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< Back Good God Too David Cowles Oct 4, 2025 “Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue, now I judge the Decalogue by my standards.” Once upon a time, we defined ‘being good’ in terms of an external metric like the Ten Commandments, or the 613 mitzvah of Torah, or the precedents of English Common Law, or the Rules dad just posted on the refrigerator door. ‘Good’ was a function of Rules, Rules a function of Authority, and Authority a function of Divine Right. Once upon a time… Now we determine for ourselves what is Good, and we use that determination to regulate our conduct and ultimately, to define our God . God no longer offers standards for us to meet (“Love one another”), now we impose our standards on God (“Do this for me”). Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue , now I judge the Decalogue by my standards. When I say something is ‘good’, I mean that I would like it to be so. It’s how I’d like things to be: ‘a good job, a good marriage, good children, etc.’ It may or may not be so or, very likely, it may be so but only imperfectly or in part; but to whatever extent it is so, it is good . To be is to be good! What is not good, to the extent that it is not good, simply is not . Of course, many things seem to mix good and bad parts or aspects…but that is an illusion! Such ‘things’ are just incomplete . (They avoided military service; they failed to be all that they could be.) Example : A glass of milk turns sour. Now it is less perfectly ‘milk’ than it was before. It has lost one of the defining characteristics of ‘milk’, namely, its refreshing drinkability. Of course, it is still a liquid; it retains those attributes. But as ‘milk’, it is less good than it was before, and therefore it is ‘less milk’ than it was. Its ‘milkness’ is incomplete. I know, crazy…but makes sense. Evil is privatio boni - a privation or absence of good, much like darkness is the absence of light or cold the absence of heat. Evil is Good, unrealized! They say there’s no such thing as a ‘bad boy’ and they’re right! But I’ve known my share of ragazzi who were ‘insufficiently virtuous’. In fact, I think Sister Mary Martha wrote that very phrase at the bottom of my 3rd grade report card. (P.S. It was not well received by my overlords!) If this seems like an arcane distinction, it isn’t. It’s a crucial tenet of Christian ontology, dating back at least as far as Augustine (c. 500 CE). It is part of what distinguishes monotheism from gnostic dualism. Of course, we still use the word, ‘evil’: “Deliver us from evil!” But evil in this context refers to sin, entropy and death: privationes boni. Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer replace ‘evil’ with ‘the evil one’ (or Satan). But even here, ‘Satan’ needs to be understood as Being’s template or shadow, not as an Actual Entity in his own right. Without God, there is no Satan! There is no such thing as Evil per se ; it does not exist because to be is to be good. Nothing is bad per se . “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” (Ray Stevens) and all things are bright and beautiful…to the extent they are at all. Admittedly, this is an unfamiliar way to view the world. We love black and white; we hate grey. (Or is it that we love grey and hate black and white?) We love to put labels on things so that we can relativize them and contextualize them down the road. God is Good. Good is God’s essence; it’s what God is. Good is who God is. Good is what God does. According to Sartre…and Job ... God's essence (Good) precedes (logically only) his existence. God is Good. It’s hard to imagine otherwise. And yet, for that very reason, knowing that God is good is not very helpful. It only matters if we know what constitutes Good . And where might we find such knowledge? Perhaps it was revealed by God in Torah or the Gospels…but note the circular reasoning. Or, as noted above, defining Good may be up to us after all. But how? Perhaps we are endowed by God with souls that have an innate sense of Good…but that too would be circular. Or maybe an innate sense of Good has evolved naturally and is now encoded in our DNA. But in that case, Good would just be synonymous with pragmatic and we know that that is often not the case. Or perhaps we develop a sense of Good by applying reason to our experiences, personal and collective. Obviously, this is a big leap. It confers virtual sovereignty on our capacity to experience events accurately and to reason about them logically. Nevertheless, of the options available, this is the ‘least obviously impossible’, so following the logic of Blaise Pascal and Sherlock Holmes, when we remove whatever is absurd, meaningless, oxymoronic, irredeemable or impossible , we must consider that whatever is left is at least probable . ‘Good’ has a dense connotative value but zero denotative value. Saying something is ‘good’ says nothing specific about the thing itself but everything about how the thing templates its world. In this context, Good is a verb. It describes a process rather than a steady state. That is why we only experience God as ‘active’ in our World. That is why idolatry is a bad faith , passive version of iconoclastic Atheism . For a concept to be useful, it needs to be fleshed out with applications identifiable in the course of ordinary human experience (e.g. measurements); but those applications need to be something other than habits, tastes, and opinions. There can never be 100% consensus about what constitutes the Good but, if the concept has validity, we should be able to detect some semantic convergence. Indeed, folks broadly agree that Good is experienced by us in our world as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Let’s be clear: we may vehemently disagree about what objects are beautiful, what propositions true, what social structures just. But for the most part, we agree that there are such things as Beauty, Truth, and Justice and that they are desirable in their own right. The alternative is some form of nihilism . Of course, my ideas of what constitutes Beauty, Truth, or Justice may be polar opposite to yours. That doesn’t matter as long as we agree that it is legitimate to apply these three values, as we interpret them, in every situation. Consider the alternative: you are a person who assigns no value, or even a negative value, to Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice. Now we have a problem, don’t we? I will debate forever about what constitutes Justice, but I can’t have any conversation with someone who does not recognize Justice as a value. Of course, in God, Beauty, Truth, and Justice are not distinct. God is one, God is simple, God is just plain Good . But that Goodness appears in our world in diverse forms appropriate to different media of experience. *** Pablo Picasso — Guernica (1937), oil on canvas - Picasso’s vast monochrome mural confronts the horrors of the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Fragmented human and animal forms writhe in a shattered space, their beauty stripped to stark geometric agony. Light—symbolized by a glaring bulb and a woman’s candle—flickers as fragile truth amid overwhelming darkness and moral chaos. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Tarot David Cowles Oct 6, 2025 “Tarot can be seen as a paradigm of Judeo-Christian spirituality. So deal me in…please!” It is hard to pick up a deck of Tarot cards without triggering associations with ordinary playing cards : the time you won big at the Black Jack tables in Vegas, the time you lost a game of strip poker at camp. Playing Cards are such a fundamental part of our culture that it is hard to imagine a time without them. And yet they were not introduced to Europe (from the Islamic world) until late in the 14th century CE. 100 years later, the first Tarot decks emerged, like seemingly everything else, in Northern Italian city states like Milan. Disney Movie : DaVinci, Machiavelli, and Savonarola are playing cards with members of the Medici family in Florence; the stakes: Middle Earth (Europe). Spoiler alert : Savonarola lost more than his clothes! Tarot modified the original deck to give it a distinctly European and Medieval character and to open up the possibility of applications beyond mere games of chance. Sidebar : History is fraught with ‘false flags’. Take the Renaissance, for example. Supposedly, it marked the rebirth of classical culture; actually, it killed it. Tarot has a similar biography. It turned Medieval Culture into a 15th century version of a Marvel comic and it confined Christendom to a pavilion at ‘Epcot Firenze’. All this 100 years before Cervantes’ great ‘Requiem for the Moyen Age’, Don Quixote . So ‘this is the way the Middle Ages end, not with a bang but a snicker ’. But there’s much more to Tarot than this! A standard Tarot deck consists of 78 cards. They are usually divided into 56 cards of the Lesser Arcana and 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Cards in the Lesser Arcana vaguely resemble the playing cards we inherited from Islam, the cards we knew and used to love…until that last trip to Atlantic City. They’re grouped in 4 suits (Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles) of 14 cards each (vs. our standard 13), including 10 cards in each suit with associated numerical values (A – 10) and 4 additional cards in each suit corresponding to personages in a paradigmatic medieval court (King, Queen, Knight and Page). Completing the Tarot Deck are the 22 ordered cards of the Major Arcana, forming what’s called the Fool’s Journey – a metaphorical path of physical and spiritual development. Two analogies spring to mind: the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross and El Camino de Santiago , aka The Way. We might view Tarot as ‘polite penance’ or ‘posh pilgrimage’ – spiritual practices well suited to the less devout and more affluent leisured classes emerging in Renaissance Italy. And speaking of journeys through life’s stages, fast forward to the mid-20 th century and meet Erik Erikson, a psychologist who divided the human life cycle into 8 stages, beginning with Infancy (0 to 18 months) and running through Seniority (Age 65+). Erikson associates each stage with a specific emotional dichotomy and a particular developmental milestone. For example, for children ages 6 through 11, the emotional challenge is Industry vs. Inferiority and the milestone is Competence . But back to Tarot: the very first card in the Major Arcana is a tipoff that we’re not in Vegas any more. The card is numbered 0 (rather than 1) and the ideogram on the card is known as The Fool – not the most auspicious way to begin a journey… or is it? My reading of the Major Arcana is that they divide life’s course into 4 rather than Erikson’s 8 stages with every journey beginning at the same spot, Ground Zero , i.e. with The Fool (#0), i.e. ‘everyman’ (sic). This is not King Lear’s Fool. This is you and me and every other sentient being in our own personal state of nature – each of us, fresh out of the womb, experiencing the world with no pre-conceived categories to guide us. The first stage takes us through puberty, and it consists entirely of our introduction to the category of the Other, i.e. other people. In our initial encounters, the Other assumes the forms of Magician and High Priestess, emphasizing the Transcendence of the Other in the experience of a newborn. Sidebar : There’s a world, there’s me, and now there’s another ‘me’ who is not me ? One of my favorite games with < 1 y.o. grandchildren is to show them their image in a mirror and watch them trying to figure out what’s happening. Of course, we are all surrounded by mirror images of ourselves 24/7, no reflective surface required. 20+ cards later this still seems magical to me! Stage One ends when we encounter the Other as our peer partner in a relationship of romantic Love. In between we meet the Other in more secular guises: Empress (mom), Emperor (dad), Hierophant (teacher, guru, mentor). Stage Two corresponds to adolescence. It poses three challenges: Mobility (Chariot), Strength, and Interiority (Hermit). Before puberty, we are weak, we rely on others for our movements, and we wear our hearts on our sleeves. With adolescence we need to assume responsibility for our own actions (Chariot), develop a quiet self-confidence (Strength), and experience the beginnings of an inner life (Hermit). With adulthood, we enter Stage Three, the realm of Industry, Commerce and Procreation. Like the Christmas elf, we place our inner Hermit on the shelf. We are immersed, if not submerged, in the realm of Chance (Wheel of Fortune), Responsibility (Justice), Consequence (Hanged Man) and Mortality (Death)! Finally, we’re ready for Stage Four, the atemporal Eschaton (Parousia, Apocalypse, Eternity). Stage Four is reminiscent of the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead . It consists of milestones ‘on the silk road’ from Immanence to Transcendence. Step one, let go of our attachments (Temperance); step two, confront evil (Devil); step three, overcome pride (Tower, Babel?); step four, reject Narcissism (Star); step five, smash idols (Moon). In truth, these 5 steps are all forms of iconoclasm. We have ‘misplaced concreteness’ (Whitehead), mistaking things that are immanent for Transcendence. With step six, we embrace sensuality and joy (Sun), a foretaste of the Transcendent. At step seven, we pass judgment on ourselves and our world and we are ready to let ourselves be judged by others in turn (Judgment). The final card in the deck (World) completes stage four; but it is also the climax of the entire journey. And what a journey! We all start off as the Fool - tiny, defenseless, and bald (no hair, Hawking) - a quantum of being. Ideally at least, we all end up with the same reward, i.e. The World. Not too shabby! Sidebar : The Old Testament Book of Job outlines a similar trajectory. Job is living a successful and virtuous life (Immanent), but he loses everything and is brought back to the state of nature (#0). He is Fool-again ( a la Joyce) – so ‘foolish’ in fact that he dares to confront God (Transcendent) face to face, judging and submitting himself to judgment (#20). As a result, he inherits the World (#21). Orthodox Christianity has for the most part taken a dim view of Tarot. At worst, it is ‘magic, demonic, and wicked’; at best it is a dangerous but frivolous distraction. Even so, the climax of the Fool’s Journey must have come as a bit of a shock: the final reward is not Paradise (Heaven) but the World. On the one hand, the Book of Revelation does speak of a New Jerusalem, so there is room for a new World in orthodox eschatology. However, Tarot’s utter lack of any reference to Heaven, or to Hell for that matter, must have been disconcerting to some. We cannot resist the temptation to see this aspect of Tarot as an omen. Machiavelli is about to turn Christian ethics upside down (‘ends justify means’). Out of Machiavelli’s head will spring the full bouquet of isms characteristic of the our Enlightenment era: Capitalism (Smith), liberalism (Locke), utilitarianism (Mill). socialism (Bentham), communism (Marx), pragmatism (James), fascism (Mussolini), secularism, and moral relativism. Of course, pockets of resistance persist: Existentialism (Sartre), Organism (Whitehead), and Hasidism (Buber) to name just three; but there is no denying that Mechanism ( La Technique – Ellul) is the dominant Spirit of this Age. But to blame that on Tarot is a bridge too far. At most, Tarot is a sign and harbinger of things to come. That said, we can embrace the profound human insight and the ultimately optimistic eschatology of Tarot without sacrificing any Judeo-Christian principles in the process. In fact, Tarot can be seen as a paradigm of Judeo-Christian spirituality. So deal me in…please! *** Image: Agnes Pelton — Awakening (Memory of Father (1943 Agnes Pelton’s Awakening (Memory of Father) (1943) is a luminous abstraction expressing a mystical experience of loss and transcendence. Soft radiating light rises from a central form, suggesting the soul’s ascent and a bridge between earthly grief and spiritual renewal. The painting embodies Pelton’s vision of awakening consciousness—where personal memory transforms into a universal, serene illumination. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Cosmology Philosophy Philosophers Society Science Guests Theology The Bible Culture The Arts Archives Spirituality Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! We are happy to be able to provide Aletheia Today to all interested readers at no cost. If it ever becomes necessary for us to charge a subscription fee, we will grandmother for life anyone subscribed as of 07/01/2025.

For centuries, many Christians have found support for their faith in the accounts of miracles worked by Jesus, and following Jesus, by various apostles, saints and martyrs. Others, however, have rejected these accounts as ‘impossible’ and therefore ‘unbelievable’ and this judgment has led them to dismiss all accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings as ‘suspect’. Robert Frost, Quantum Mechanic Robert Frost This article offers the best overall introduction to Frost and his contribution: Robert Frost was Wrong So woods-walking Frost finds himself at a crossroads. Like each of us 100 times every day, he must make a choice. But what is the nature of ‘choice’ per se? The Road Taken Frost’s poem can be viewed in light of the more recently developed Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of QM. We argue that what Frost proposes is not MWI…but better! Janis Joplin and Robert Frost Finally, we examine Frost’s contribution to the ‘Freedom vs. Values’ debate and include perspectives from Joplin, Nietzsche, Sartre, and…wait for it…Pope Leo XIII. The Frost Diamond We expound on the ontological implications of Frost’s model, comparing its structure to that of a liquid, suggesting parallels with Heraclius (everything flows): Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back Grace Krzenski Young Writer Winner, Winter 2023 Grace Krzenski is a junior at Cabrini High School, New Orleans, where she enjoys studying science and English. Grace is on the varsity Cabrini basketball team, and in her spare time enjoys reading, playing basketball, and spending time with family and friends. She is looking forward to attending college somewhere in the southern states to study marine biology. Integrity vs. Life

Dive into the Yuletide issue of Aletheia Today! Explore the intersection of faith and science through reflections on the Christmas season, stories of hope, and timeless traditions reimagined. Celebrate the birth of the messiah, the meaning of Bethlehem shepherds, and how to deal with grief at Christmas. Inside Yuletide 2024 Philosophy After Parmenides What? "Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it." Life on Mars “Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy”. Theology Beholding the Gift of Messiah "Fully beholding the gift of the Messiah enables me to see Him in the daily moments not only of Advent, but each and every day of the year." Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” Jesus Gets Us! “A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” R U Body, Soul or Spirit? “Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” Culture & The Arts Pando and Me “Pando is Pando because Pando isn’t ‘Pando’ anymore!” The Secret of the Bethlehem Shepherds "In my research, I discovered that the shepherds were important to St. Luke for a simple reason: They were the primary eyewitnesses of the events in Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth, and they passed down the story through established methods of oral transmission." Spirituality Bending With Angels, Resting in the Wait of Christmas "In the silence of time, God's chosen ones fervently pray "Messiah" on their lips as it was in olden times and is now. "Come, Lord Jesus!" "Come again, Lord Jesus!" When All Is Not So Merry and Bright "Hidden grief whispers loud among us, especially at Christmas, as we navigate losses too often dismissed or unacknowledged—but even in the pain, there’s a gift waiting to be unwrapped." Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32) < Back The Mustard Seed David Cowles Sep 1, 2024 “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32) Jesus’ parables are a mixed bag. Some are clear and incredibly insightful. Others are opaque, serpentine, and hard to interpret. Even the apostles couldn’t make head nor tail of some of them. I do not mean to give Jesus ‘notes’. He had issues! As has often been pointed out, he could not relate to his followers using only the abstract concepts of ‘professional’ philosophers and theologians. He needed to give his audience something they could relate to and so he needed to rely on imagery familiar to everyday Palestinians in the first century CE. But that was a secondary motivation! More importantly, Jesus needed to ‘code’ his message. At the beginning of his public ministry, he tried proclaiming it directly in the synagogue in Capernaum and barely escaped with his life. “Won’t make that mistake again. So much for 40 days in the desert wrestling with Satan. Time for Plan B!” Beginning with Matthew the Evangelist, Christians have gone to great lengths to situate the Christian message as a logical continuation of themes found in what we now know as the Old Testament. And rightly so! But this laudable theological exercise blunts our realization of just how radical Jesus’ teachings were . Supported only by a ‘gang’ of men and boys recruited from remote, hillside villages in the Galilee, Jesus was preparing to take on two global superpowers: Rome (political) and Jerusalem (religious). Not that these two elites had much in common. The Jesus Story is firmly embedded within a much longer conflict between Israel’s two ‘masters’. Pontius Pilate to his credit tried to maintain a modicum of ‘peace’ between the two parties; of course, he failed! Ironically, about the only thing the political and religious forces could agree on was their mutual disdain for Jesus. So let’s recap. On one side, we have Rome’s ‘global’ political hegemony (Empire) supported by overwhelming military might. On the other side, a millennia old theology and religious tradition, fundamentally theocratic and anarchic, rapidly gaining converts all the way from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules. “And then came Maude” (aka Jesus of Nazareth)! I wonder how William Hill™ would have handicapped this 3 way race. Spoiler Alert : Over the next 400 years, the ‘glory that was Rome’ faded out. Efforts to revive it (800 CE, 1500 CE) were never fully successful. Judaism continued to spread and became an important world-wide religion but, for various reasons, failed to reach ‘critical mass’. Only Christianity achieved ‘escape velocity’. The Jesus Story often presents the political and religious establishments as a collection of bungling fools, too preoccupied with their own interests to respond effectively to Jesus’ challenge. Nothing could be further from reality. Just ask Jesus’ cousin, John, the Baptist, arrested, imprisoned and beheaded. Or the two prisoners crucified alongside Jesus on Calvary. Or Barabas whose life became a bargaining chip. Imagine his shock when he learned that he was being released as part of a comprehensive ‘deal’ to kill Jesus. For one brief evening, the Roman Governor (Pilate), the local ruler (Herod), and the Chief Priest joined hands and sang Kumbaya . That’s how much of a threat Jesus was to political order and religious orthodoxy. In fact, far from dropping the ball, the forces of reaction dogged Jesus from the very first days of his public ministry. To survive even three years, Jesus needed to deploy a complex strategy: Stay out of the big cities, avoid the limelight, take the roads less traveled. Stay out of Judea, until the end, and even minimize time in Galilee. Jesus was most at home in the region north of the Sea of Galilee, from the shores of Lebanon (Type and Sidon) to Syria (Golan) and along the East bank of the Jordan, including the Greek cities of the Decapolis – areas where sway of the political and religious powers was weakest. Swear witnesses and beneficiaries to secrecy. Encode his teachings in the language of parables, only explaining the unencrypted meaning to his closest disciples. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . purpose and devotion. Return to Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Marcel Proust David Cowles “Who has not dreamed of reliving a cherished moment, not through the ghostly shadows of mind but, like Job, in the flesh?” Remembrance of Things Past (‘RTP’) is widely regarded as the most influential novel of the 20th century (lie quiet, Joyce). It is also, IMO, one of the most thoroughly misunderstood. The fault lies both in a failure of imagination…and in a failure of translation. Proust called his seven-volume masterpiece, Recherche du Temp Perdu , better rendered as Search for Lost Time . Appropriately, Proust named the 7th volume of his tome, Time Regained . Bingo! He prayed to St. Anthony… et voilà ! French has perfectly good words for ‘memory’ ( memoire ) and ‘remember’ ( souvenir ), but Proust does not use these terms. Instead, he chooses a derivative of chercher , to search. Memories are the ‘stuff’ of RTP but ‘memory’ per se is incidental. Proust is not remembering; he’s recovering and reliving. The goal is not to reminisce but to resurrect! Who has not dreamt of reliving a cherished moment, not through the ghostly shadows of mind but, like Job, in the flesh? RTP is a map to such a past – not to our ‘remembrance’ of the past, but to the past itself. The things we do to preserve our past! We take snapshots, we make videos, we curate (and then liberally ‘edit’) memories, and we revisit scenes of past triumphs (real or imagined) – all to no avail. We are trying to get to the center of the earth by moving across its surface. Unless we’re poets, we tend to ignore events themselves. We pay more attention to the connections between events: causality (science), synchronicity (magic), etc. We don’t ask, “What is it?” We ask instead, “Where did it come from? How did it get here? Where is it going? What does it do? What’s it worth? How can I make it? How can I make it better? How can I make it cheaper? And how much can I charge for it?” We care about our cherished past, and we anxiously await our uncertain future, but we ignore, or at least marginalize, the present. Proust proposes a totally different approach. Like Rand McNally, Proust provides us with a ‘road atlas’. However, Proust’s routes do not connect Past and Future through an insignificant truck stop known as the Present. They are not part of the Federal Highway System…their maintenance does not require tolls, or a bloated gas tax. Rather, they run perpendicular to Interstate Route 90. They conflate the Past and the Future in the Present moment . They allow us to be in Istanbul and Constantinople simultaneously, all while sipping hot coffee and downing chicken fried steak at our favorite roadside diner. Proust suggests we surf our way through life. He’s the OB² (Original Beach Boy). But Proust did not surf waves; he surfed qualia - philosophical jargon for ‘what’ something is, its attributes, its characteristics, its Wassein (not its Dasein ), its essence (not its existence). This is round, red, and squishy ( qualia ). Incidentally, it happens to be a ball. So what’s more important? The position of the ball relative to other entities in spacetime? Or the qualities manifest by the ball itself? Obviously, it depends. If the ball is hurtling toward you at 75 mph, the position of that ball in spacetime is paramount, but if you’re rolling the ball back and forth with your favorite toddler, how it looks and feels might take precedence. According to Proust, the sound of a spoon striking porcelain can connect you instantly to another event manifesting common qualia , no matter how separated the two events may be in time and space. The shared qualia constitute a wormhole. Mere memory is greatly overrated; lowly bacteria have memory. Memory is a pale substitute for ‘the real thing’ and, above all else, RTP is a ticket to what’s real. RTP is commonly understood as a novel about ‘memory’; it isn’t. It is a polemic against memory! Proust has plenty of memories; they fill all 7 volumes of RTP. But memory is manifestly not what this book is about! “There is a vast difference between the real impression that we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it that we form for ourselves when we attempt, by an act of will, to imagine it…” (i.e., to remember it). Anyone can reminisce; not everyone can resurrect. In the early first century CE, there was no shortage of ‘Messiahs’, but not every wannabe could raise the dead. Might we not say the same of 20th-century novelists? Proust, Joyce, Stein, and…who else? Perhaps as much as any Francophone author, Proust knew his way around words. He did not choose his titles carelessly. When he called his final volume Time Regained, it was likely because he believed he had indeed recovered ‘Lost Time’. If so, RTP presents us with brand-new cosmology! Let’s hear what Proust himself has to say on the subject: “It was Venice…the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation…” Proust does not remember; he relives. And when he relives, he does not recall selected, superficial qualia associated with a prior event; he recreates the event itself, and he re-experiences all its qualia …not from outside-in as memory but from inside-out. “…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other… The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” Normally, we experience at Time A an event that occurs at Time A. The experience leaves us with a bouquet of cherished (or despised) memories. Then, at Time B, we recall our memories of Time A: we reminisce! This has nothing to do with Proust! Proust does not ‘remember’ A from the security of B. He is not Wordsworth, recollecting emotion in tranquility. Proust conflates A and B. There is only one experience, only one event, and that experience happens at Time A and at Time B - not once at A and again at B, but once …at A and B. Wait a minute! Does this sound at all familiar? Isn’t this a perfect description of Quantum Entanglement (QM)? But that can’t be, can it? I mean, John Bell didn’t even discover ‘quantum entanglement’ until 1964, so… With QE a single event can be bilocated and its two loci can be far apart. Jesus was ‘sacrificed’ only once – but that sacrifice occurred on Calgary c. 33 CE and daily thereafter in Eucharist. Redemption, in the Christian tradition, is a WORM : “Write once, read many times!” Remember when you went to Venice? Afterward, you bored your friends to the brink of inebriation with your endless slide shows (yes, plural). It was not a good look. But you were one person experiencing Venice at two different times, in two different places, and in two very different ways (experiencing & remembering). One man, two events . When Proust went to Venice, the only camera packed was his mind. Years later, when he ‘revisited Venice’ in the tranquility of his garden, he was a different man but reliving the same event. Two men, one event . That’s the difference between Proust…and you. We imagine the world as four-dimensional graph paper. In this scheme, called Spacetime, there’s a place for everything, and everything has its place. We’re very familiar with experiences structured according to spacetime relations. It’s been drilled into us from the moment our moms first positioned mobiles above our cribs. It’s our ‘Mercator Projection’ of real life…and it can be very useful. Useful, for example, if you’re trying to assess the strength of certain physical forces at certain distances…or land a probe on Titan. For other purposes, however, this Cartesian framework is less relevant. Enter Proust! He suggests the possibility that experiences could relate altogether differently, e.g., according to their qualia . A red napkin sits atop a blue tablecloth. Across the room a gentleman sports a red pocket square. In ‘Proust space’, the ‘remote’ pocket square may be ‘closer’ to the napkin than the ‘tangent’ tablecloth on which it lies. Under the right circumstances, pocket square and the napkin can be experienced as a single event, shattering the tyranny of spacetime. What if we situated all phenomena, not according to time or place, but according to their qualia ? Suppose we treat the color red (above) as a wormhole connecting all things red? What if we mapped all the phenomena of the universe, not according to time and place, but according to the wave lengths of their reflected light? “…What we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations ( qualia ) and the memories that envelop us simultaneously…” No mention of nasty objects ! At the time RTP was being published, Bertrand Russell was exploring the possibility that only qualia are real. Curiosity Corner : Spacetime and Qualia are two competing logoi , each connecting all the events that make up the World but connecting them differently according to different algorithms. Are there other logoi that could perform the same function? As noted above, Proust proposed a non-local cosmology 40+ years before John Bell applied the concept to QM. Did Bell have RTP in mind? Qualia are the agent and the outcome of entanglement. My red ball and your red wagon are ‘entangled’ via their ‘shared redness’. How are we to understand a world that is both extensive and entangled? Think of ‘reality’ as a multiplicity of inherently unrelated events. Like molecules in a gas, these events interact with one another randomly (Brownian Motion). Each event is sui generis . In the process of autogenesis, it creates positive and negative relations along multiple parameters with every other event in its Actual World. Philosophers and physicists often treat the phase space of these events as a Block. Each parameter gives rise to a unique logos , a web linking each event to every other event in the Block according to a specific parameter. Each such logos is an n-1 dimensional surface of the Block. Nerd Nook : An n-dimensional Block houses an infinite number of n-1 dimensional surfaces . Spacetime is one such surface; it’s the superposition of all surfaces that order events according to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy). There are innumerable surfaces that satisfy this condition. Each such surface corresponds to an alternative path that events may elect to follow. They define the range of choices available to me in life. What are the implications? First, note that free will is scrupulously preserved, but we exercise that will by choosing among an array of potential paths. We do not create these paths, as is commonly supposed; we choose them (St. Paul - Ephesians 2:10). But not to worry – our options are innumerable, and functionally, choosing a path is no different from creating one…except maybe a tad easier. Spirit Center : Our choice of path does not alter that path, or any other path, or the Block itself. On the other hand, the path we choose, once chosen, determines how we experience the Block, and how we experience the Block is how the Block experiences itself. So yes, we matter! Whatever path we choose for our worldline, we have the comfort of knowing that God made the journey before us…and makes it again with us. He blazes our trails… and he is the ultimate ‘fellow traveler’: we never have to feel alone again! (Psalm 23) Proust’s ontology resolves the dichotomy of free will and determinism. The inventory of all possible paths is determined (Schrödinger, St. Paul). Our choice among those paths is totally free and unconditioned in any way (Sartre). Note: this is neither a restriction nor a limitation. Beyond these paths…nothing is! Proust anticipates Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics . Whatever can happen ‘does happen’…on some surface. He respects Richard Feynmann’s Sum over Histories . Insofar as events can be regarded as ‘determined’, what is determined is the sum (overlay) of all possible paths. Yet we actualize just one such potential path: e pluribus unum . C.S. Lewis wrote about this phenomenon in The Great Divorce . We are all already living in Heaven or Hell. But the location of our residence is not assigned by lottery or determined by merit. We can live anywhere we choose…but we do have to choose: no dachas , no time shares, no pieds-à-terre . With this model, Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken rises to the level of Scripture. The slight unevenness of the paving stones in Proust’s garden, Derrida’s différance , resonates with a similar sensation years earlier at St. Mark’s in Venice. The quantum of difference between two stones constitutes a portal that allows Proust to be in two places at once (France & Italy), literally. We do not save the world; we are saved by the world. Experience ( esse est percipi ) outside of time creates perceiving subjects outside of time: “A minute freed from the order of time had recreated in us, to feel it , the man freed from the order of time.” With this, Proust places himself in an august, if ‘sparsely settled’, philosophical tradition. In a word, the subject does not create the predicate – the predicate creates (or distills) the subject. Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy, and his sidekick, Heidegger, believed that ‘Being happens’ ( being is a verb) when two potential beings ‘self-actualize’ by giving each other ‘reck’. St. John wrote that beings come into being as a function of a relational grid ( logos , the Christ). Martin Buber wrote that relationship is substructural. R. Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a Verb,” and The Beatles sang, “All you need is love.” Who have I missed? Bill Gates once said that the key to a successful business is creating a product that everybody wants and then making sure they can’t get it anywhere else. Proust takes it for granted that everyone wants eternal salvation . (He might be surprised to meet some of today’s ists : anarch ists , nihil ists , human ists , hedon ists , existential ists , commun ists …I could go on!) However, Proust does take time to assure readers that his is the one and only path to such redemption. For example, he refers to “…our inherent powerlessness to realize ourselves in material enjoyment or in effective action.” That alone takes care of more than a few of those ists. It’s fun to travel. I loved visiting the Colosseum, but I didn’t relive the experience of a 1st century Christian (fortunately), nor did I expect to. I enjoy occasional visits to the ‘haunts’ of my youth, scenes of my imagined past triumphs, but I do not then become a late ‘60s urban warrior. As Proust put it, “…(What) had reawakened in me had no connection with what I frequently tried to recall to myself…with the help of an undifferentiated memory…those quite different images that preserve nothing of life… (and) I knew that Lost Time would not be found again on the Piazza of St. Marks…” We rediscover the past, not by remembering it, and certainly not by ‘going on location’, but by fully experiencing the present and engaging the past through that present. Catholics experience something like this every day in the Sacrament of Eucharist. They engage substantially with the Body and Blood of Christ, ubiquitous, eternal and born c. 0 CE in Palestine, under the appearance of ordinary bread and wine. Proust offers a similar vision. He presents the world as ‘sacrament’ but without specifying a particular metaphysical context. He does not contradict Christian cosmology but demystifies it and potentially broadens its appeal. Merci, Marcel! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Share Previous Next

< Back Prayer For Resting in God's Timing, Ways, and Rhythm Deborah Rutherford My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Am I striving, then causing friction and confusion? This is when I slow down to rest in God's timing, ways, and rhythms -- to repent and return to Jesus, the One who carries. His will, not mine. Dear Abba, oh Father, thank you for your tender-loving kindness and mercy. Forgive me when I rush ahead of you, when I strive, push, and wander away. Oh, let me rest in you, your timing and ways, and slow down to stillness with you, where I hear your lovely voice. My day is yours as you lead me through the most beautiful dance of life. My road is your beautiful, peaceful one. Please, help me stay on your narrow road of joy and peace, love and light, heading to the forever of ever with you, our love eternal. Thank you, I am humbled by your love, in Jesus's name. Amen. Slow down to the incredible life God has planned for you by resting in His timing, ways, and rhythm, the endearing moment by moment of God's love. I have to remind myself to slow down often, that God is growing me in His timing, not mine. My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Rest in His timing, ways, and rhythms. Hi. I am Deborah Rutherford, a Christian wife, passionate about Jesus and her family. I am currently a writer, makeup artist, and sometimes singer. You can find me on my blog at www.deborahrutherford.com. Previous Next

< Back What Do You Know, Joe? David Cowles May 14, 2024 “...The less you ‘know’, the less certainly wrong you are. You approach truth by shedding error. What can I unlearn today?” My six-year-old grandchild confronted my daughter, “Tell me everything you know.” And it got me thinking…what do we know? How do we know it? And how confident are we that we’ve got it right? Riddle : How is knowledge like an onion? Answer : It makes us cry? Well, yes, that, but also, it presents as a series of concentric spheres: You peel it like sweet Vidalia! The outermost layer (‘Level One’) consists of practical, how-to knowledge: how to build a car, how to fly to the moon, how to repair a pothole (as if!). I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty secure about our knowledge at this level. Of course, we will learn to do stuff better, but I can’t foresee us concluding that a major part of this Level One knowledge is actually false . Level One Confidence : > 99%. When it comes to ‘what works’, we’ve a pretty extensive library. Most of what we know at Level One, we learned merely by trial and error. Just imagine how much we don’t have to know in order to know that rubbing two sticks together can generate a flame. Next level : Why does rubbing two sticks together, in the proper way under the proper conditions, make fire? Well, we’ve got a handle on that too…we think. We have a model of friction and kindling that accounts for the phenomenon of flame. It’s possible that it might get tweaked someday but it’s unlikely to be proven flat out wrong. Unlikely…but not inconceivable. Level Two Confidence : 99%. After ‘friction and kindling’ things get interesting. If you’re thinking of serving ‘hearts of onion’ at your next lawn party, you’ll want to begin here. If ‘friction and kindling’ can account for flame, what do we need to know to account for the fact that friction and kindling can generate fire? What questions do we need our next layer of onion to address? Well, we need a theory of stability and change, of material and metamorphosis. We have sticks, we have motion, but why is it that sticks + motion generate flame? Once again, we have an answer: matter + heat. We feel good about what we know but now we’re just a little bit less certain. Maybe some new model will come along that we’ll like better. Probably not, but maybe. Level Three Confidence : 95%. “Going down! Level Four, particles and forces,” intoned the elevator operator (c. 1960 CE). My favorite floor! Bosons, hadrons, and fermions, oh my! The so-called ‘Standard Model’ is like a Las Vegas buffet: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” ( Finnegan’s Wake ) Now it is likely (but not certain) that this ‘Standard Model’ will have to be tweaked. Much of the information we’re working with will carry over, but new details are likely to emerge. Level Four Confidence : 50%. What’s next? What comes after Fundamental Particles and Forces? What’s more fundamental than ‘fundamental’? Surprisingly, this silly question has a serious answer; actually, it has a lot of serious answers: strings, n-dimensional spaces, topological twists, singularities, quantum gravity, branes, the multiverse…and that’s the problem: ‘a lot of serious answers’. Level Five Confidence : 10%. But believe it or not, we’re still not finished. The most important question of all remains: What’s it all about, Alfie ? (Don’t say ‘42’…or ‘a ripe banana’) We have arrived on the shore of the River Styx, the ‘turn’ as we say in Texas Hold ’em, the place where physics and metaphysics meet, where cosmology and theology merge. What lies ‘behind’ all this, if anything? Our search now must take us to other realms: to scripture, poetry, and philosophy. To mysticism and music. To art in all its forms. We are no longer in the realm of the empirical. Given that , what’s our confidence level? Sidebar : In the Divine Comedy , Dante and Virgil encounter Satan at the nadir of the Inferno; he is encased in a block of ice. As our travelers depart Hell for Purgatory, they look back and are surprised to see Satan hanging upside down. Dante and Virgil are traveling through non-orientable space. So are we! I would even go so far as to say we are ‘disoriented’, wouldn’t you? But it’s not just Dante, Virgil and us, dear reader. People have been disoriented for millennia. Like that time you took LSD in the ‘60s. Or the time Alice was turned around in Through the Lookingglass . Trying to walk to the top of a nearby hill, she kept finding herself further away. Precocious child, she decided to walk away from the hill…and soon she found herself at the summit. Now the math gets really interesting, because from here on, all values are negative : the ‘more we know’ the ‘less we know ’. Crazy? Crazy! But also true. For example, suppose you claim to know all Level Six information with 100% certainty. Congratulations! But what you know you know with a confidence level of -100% . You don’t just know nothing; much worse: what you do ‘know’ is certainly wrong. From here on, the less you ‘know’, the less certainly wrong you are. You approach truth by shedding error. What can I unlearn today? Teacher, unlearn me! If you manage to get to a point where you fully understand that you know absolutely nothing on this level…then perception and reality meet again. You know nothing and you know nothing with a confidence level of 0%. Why 0%, not 100%? Because to be sure you knew nothing would be a kind of knowledge…and I can’t grant you even that. Sorry, old bean. So now, just imagine the plight of the poor philosopher, working all her life just to get as close as she can to knowing nothing and then knowing nothing with no confidence. Well, that’s you! (…and me). Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

Aletheia Today celebrates winter writing through process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays. Addressing questions like "Is God real?" and "Does Heaven exist?", this issue offers a thoughtful exploration of the spiritual and scientific aspects of holiday celebrations, encouraging a harmonious dialogue between faith and reason. Inside Our Winter Issue Philosophy I Seem To Be a Klein Bottle “I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.” Should I Vote? “What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened!” Robert Frost “Anyone can go for a walk in the woods; only Frost can ‘walk this way’.” Determinism…or Entanglement? “Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.” Theology A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Faith Is Not Belief Without Evidence "Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love." Culture & The Arts Mythology Before Marvel Comics “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” The Science Behind the 7-Second Rule "First impressions swiftly shape neural pathways, steering our social interactions through rapid cognitive processes." Home Alone “Macaulay Culkin is ‘every boy’ and his Home Alone family is ‘America’s family’ – except it’s not!” What Are Farm Animals Thinking? New research is revealing surprising complexity in the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock. Spirituality Mamisoa In the heart of poverty, a community's spirit shines, defying limitations, and embracing hope against all odds. Finding Light: A Prayer for Wisdom and Forgiveness Embracing clarity, forgiveness, and purpose Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines, most notably "Mississippi Magazine" and Worklight. Her blog, "That Time You," was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website, or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. < Back Annie D. Stutley Contributor, Editorial Board Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines, most noticeably Mississippi Magazine and Worklight . Her blog, " That Time You, " was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website , or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. Never Skip Over the Miracle Burying Biscuit (to Cole Porter) -- a Childhood in a Single Tale How to Summer All Year The Resurrection Promises More than Heaven The Porta Potty Perspective That Time You Told a Sunrise Lie The Leading Player of Memories That Time You Were Not Exceptionally Divine That Time You Saw Dead People The Unexpected Sophistication of B Movies Messengers Among Us Yesterday, the Very Tomorrow