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< Back The Comedy of Job David Cowles “Failure to appreciate the comic elements in Job has resulted in an almost universal misreading of the text.” Comedy? I’ve heard the Book of Job described as tragedy, wisdom, and history, but never as comedy. How can the loss of one’s family, property, health, and social standing possibly be funny? Talk about ‘dark humor;’ but trust me (or don’t), it’s hilarious! The banter between Job and his so-called ‘comforters,’ even between Job and God, is as funny as any modern sitcom–no, funnier. The best way to show this would be to recast the epic poem as a stage or screen play. But where are Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Ionesco, and Beckett when we need them? Absent a master’s touch, would you at least let me point out some of the funniest snippets of the epic? This is not a sterile exercise in literary criticism. Failure to appreciate the comic elements in Job has resulted in an almost universal misreading of the text. As we shall see, proper recognition of the comic element sets things right. The Book of Job consists of 42 chapters, 40 of which contain a magnificent epic poem, every bit the equal of Homer’s diptych. The poem is nestled between a prose Prologue and a very brief prose Epilogue. For various reasons, we will focus only on the poem itself (95% of the total text). That said, I will also ignore the 6 chapters devoted to the input of a younger comforter, Elihu. These chapters are of dubious provenance and sit inert in the middle of the text. They contribute nothing to the discussion and neither Job nor God, nor the other comforters even refer to them. The epic proper begins with Job lamenting the day of his birth. Nothing funny about this. But Job has the added misfortune of being surrounded by (false) friends, three so-called ‘comforters’, cold comfort indeed! Eliphaz speaks first. Like a pre-pubescent boy in a schoolyard, Eliphaz responds to Job’s genuine suffering and heartfelt reflection with a taunt: “It is you who have fortified the trembling, and limp arms, you have strengthened. The stumbling would your words raise up, and buckling knees would you stiffen.” Eliphaz is, of course, being facetious. He applies to Job attributes usually reserved for God. “But now that (calamity) has come to you, you cannot (bear it). It touches you yourself and you are shaken…Call out now! Does anyone answer you? ... Rather, I would seek out El (God), before Elohim (also ‘God’) I would lodge my complaint.” 21 st Century translation: “If you don’t like the way God’s treated you, sue him.” Eliphaz is urging Job to do what he himself wouldn’t dream of doing: “Let’s see if I can goad Job into doing something so stupid that God will punish him even more! How much fun would that be!” But as we shall see (much later), Job turns the tables on Eliphaz and the other comforters. He does sue God…and he wins. Eliphaz and the other comforters are properly chastised and shamed. The story of Job has a happy ending, but the road to that climax is long and tortured; and in any event, I’m getting way ahead of myself. For now, Job must be content to banter back: “Thus have you now become naught (to me); you see a terrifying sight (me) and you are seized with fear.” Like most bullies, Eliphaz’ behavior is grounded in his own insecurity…and Job knows that. Foolishly, Job continues. Does he really think we can get through to these bullies? Now a second comforter, Bildad, joins the circle of torment: “(How long) will the words of your mouth be a massive wind? …(Suffering) is the fate of all who reject El.” Of course, this is ironic, since Job alone ‘knows’ El and keeps his commandments. But what miscreant doesn’t love it when a goody-two-shoes (Job) gets his comeuppance, even when it is undeserved. Job pretty much ignores Bildad’s noise; he is still mulling over Eliphaz’s suggestion: “If one wanted to press charges against him, not once in a thousand (times) would he respond…Even in the right, I would get no response…I do not trust that he would hear my complaint…and who can convene such a legal proceeding?” As with anyone in Job’s predicament, there is an inevitable undercurrent of despair: “The earth is handed over to the wicked. He covers the eyes of its judges; if not he, then who? …I will be found guilty, so why should I strive in vain.” Now a third comforter, Zophar, joins in, “A hollow man (Job) will be filled with intelligence when a wild ass is born to a human.” In other words, when pigs fly, Job! Here, Job loses his famous patience! There’s no reasoning with these taunters. He decides to call them out, “Truly you are people of intelligence and with you, wisdom will die! …Rather ask Behemoth (hippo) and it will instruct you, or the fowl of the sky – and it will tell you. Or converse with the earth…and the fish of the sea.” Job challenges the over-intellectualized theology of his tormentors. He suggests they return to basics. In the immortal words of John, Paul, George and Ringo ( Yellow Submarine ), “Be empirical, look!” Like Heidegger and others, the Job-poet calls for a theology rooted in phenomenology, i.e., personal experience. “I would rather speak to Shaddai (another name for God); it is an argument with El I desire. But you, you are smearers of lies, false physicians, all of you. If only you would keep silent – that would be wisdom for you !” Well said, Job, but unfortunately these bullies don’t get the message. They never do! Eliphaz jumps back in: “Does ‘a sage’ utter such windy speech and fill his belly with an east wind?” To which Job answers, “Futile comforters are you all. Is there no end to (your own) windy speech?” Throughout Job’s dialogue with the comforters and later with God, the interlocutors throw each other’s words back and forth. They repeat others’ words but put them in different contexts that give them different meaning. ‘Wind/windy’ is a good example. Job is the first to use the word, “Do you regard (my) words as just wind?” A classic victim’s mistake! A modern-day Maimonides needs to publish A Guide for the Bullied . Item #1 : Don’t give your tormentors anything they can use against you. Job flunks Victimology 101. “Do you regard my words as just wind?” is translated by the tormentors as “My words are just wind!” Wind is wonderful for word play; its various meanings run up and down the semantic register. Job is into the game now: “Futile comforters are you all: is there no end to windy speech?” On one hand, “windy speech” could mean, facetiously, “spirit inspired”…or it could refer to a disorganized and meaningless blast of air. It could apply to a verbose orator, but it can also refer to a certain noisy and often smelly bodily excretion, aka a fart! After a second lame attack from Bildad, Job goes on offense . In the most famous lines in the entire poem, he succinctly summarizes his theology and warns Bildad of impending doom: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will testify on earth. From behind my skin I look out, while in the flesh I’ll see Eloah (God). Something I myself will view - what my eyes, not a stranger’s, will see…you (Bildad) had better fear the sword…you had better beware of demons.” Job is digging himself into an ever deepening pit. There may be no recovering from this; Job may need to change schools. Now Zophar joins the circle of torment, but Job cuts him short: “After I speak, you may (continue to) mock yourself ” (i.e., blather on). Yet, Job uses his tirade against Zophar to score a major point: “Should I not lose patience over evil?” The comforters are apologists for evil; they excuse God for that which is evident to their senses. Here, Job throws down the gauntlet: Evil is evil and there’s no excusing it, period! In other words, even God must be good. Today, people debate “Good without God?” Job asks a much more interesting question: “God without Good?” From our 21 st century theological perch, it is hard to appreciate how controversial this was at the time. Suffice to say, it only served to further isolate Job as a minority of one. Sidebar : There is a modern analog. In 1964, Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, addressed these words to the Republican National Convention: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” One third of the delegates walked out! Evidently, they too were willing to make peace with slavery and exploitation. Not Job! The Book of Job reads like a textbook of modern political theory: any correspondence between rhetoric and reality is entirely co-incidental. Now Eliphaz jumps back in with a tactic worthy of his 21 st century (CE) heirs. He accuses Job of precisely that crime of which Job is most innocent: exploiting the poor and neglecting their cry. It is a fabrication made from whole cloth, but hey, you can fool some of the people…, right? Like any skilled debater, Job does not give Eliphaz’ nonsense the honor of a reply; he’s already on to other things: “If you would let me know how to find him (God)…I would lay before him my lawsuit.” After a variety of legal maneuvers worthy of OJ’s Dream Team , God answers Job's summons and appears before him in a whirlwind. From the outset, God is contemptuous of his opponent and his remarks are dripping with sarcasm: “Who is this who obscures good counsel, (using) words without knowledge? ...I will ask you, and you will let me know…Tell me – if you truly know wisdom.” From here on, God’s speech consists primarily of a game of Have you Ever , punctuated with a few Double Dog Dares from A Christmas Story . He challenges Job to compare CVs with him: “Have you ever in your days summoned daybreak…Have you ever reached the sources of the Sea? ...Tell - if you know all of this. On what path dwells the light? ...You must know, for you were born then, your number of days is so many.” God is furious; he cannot contain his anger at Job’s effrontery. His words are venom tipped arrows. But notice what God does not do! He does not ‘smite Job with the jaw bone of an ass’ nor does he withdraw from the legal proceeding itself. Job is unfazed. Like Moses and Elijah, Job has anticipated God’s bluster and knows he must remain impassive if he is to get through it. Think Menelaus holding on tight to the shape-shifting Proteus. Eventually, God runs out of steam, “Should Eloah answer an accuser?” After all the ink and tears that have been spilled over this, now God questions whether he should even have responded to Job in the first place: “Maybe I should have taken the fifth…or drank a fifth.” Too late now, God, that horse is long since out of that barn. God’s rhetorical question creates an opportunity for Job to get a word in edgewise, finally, and Job makes good, but laconic, use of the opportunity: “Lacking respect, how can I answer you? My hand I place over my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not repeat – Twice, and I will no more.” For millennia critics have taken Job’s words as an apology; how could they? At the most, this is the unfelt, sarcastically toned apology of a teenager. At the very most! Ask yourself, “Who’s disrespecting whom?” Either Job has disrespected God, and so forfeited the right to answer him, or God has disrespected Job, and forfeited the right to hear Job’s answer. In the first instance, Job’s words must be understood facetiously; in the second instance, as sarcasm. Job has apparently ‘rested’ his case. God now has one last chance to make a convincing argument. Wisely, he chooses a different tack: “Will you go so far as to breach my justice? Accuse me of wrong so that you are in the right? If you’ve an arm (as strong as) El’s…crush the wicked where they stand…Then I myself will praise you.” In other words, “Just do it!” Enough with the rhetoric, Job, if you can do better, go ahead; I won’t stand in your way and the whole world is anxious to see what you can accomplish. Bill Clinton is famous for saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” In other words, stay on message. Job is famous for saying something like, “It’s justice, stupid,” and sticking to it. He must not, and he will not fall prey to God’s distractions. God closes with the tired reminiscence of an old man regaling the rest of his nursing home gang with tales of his past exploits: “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.” (Eliot) God spends his last 13 verses lionizing his creatures, Behemoth and Leviathan. One can imagine him thinking, “Yes, they are fierce, but at least they don’t talk back like you, Job.” God’s final stanza is nothing but sad, “He (Leviathan) has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he. All that is haughty he’s got in his view; over beasts of all kinds he is king.” Job has previously stated something akin to the swami’s famous line in the Beatles’ movie, Help : “I will say no more!” But like the swami, he will say more. He cannot resist ‘the last word,’ and on that ‘word’ rests the whole meaning of Job, the foundation of Judeo-Christian theology: “I have known you are able to do all; that you cannot be blocked from any scheme. (God’s defense is not responsive to Job’s complaint.) Who is this revealing counsel without knowledge? (God.) Truly, I have spoken without comprehending - wonders beyond me that I do not know. ‘Hear now and I will speak! I will ask you, and you will help me know’ (not) . As a hearing by ear I have heard you, and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on ‘dust and ashes’ (human beings).” Doesn’t it make you just want to reach out and slap him (Job that is, not God)? Oh, to be back in the 1950s! Any reader who has ever parented a teenager can put herself in God’s shoes, and any superannuated child can sympathize with Job. It’s the age-old battle of the generations, played out on the grandest of all scales. How can anyone have missed this? How come almost everyone has missed it? Answer: the incredible power of popular superstition. “God cannot be wrong, not even in an allegorical fable because he is God. What need have we of evidence…or even legal reasoning?” Theology 101 should begin with the Book of Job…and with the much older story of Job. It is a searing indictment of top-down theological reasoning. As Heidegger said, genuine philosophy (and by extension theology) must begin at the level of first person experience. We need to take ourselves more seriously…and less! We need to see the humor behind our entire endeavor. We need to eschew Sartre’s Spirit of Seriousness . God laughs at our efforts to understand him, but I hear that laughter as good-humored (not like that of Job’s comforters). We need to take a page from God’s book: lighten-up and know that I am God. **Calling all playwrights! Do you wish you’d written Waiting for Godot ? Or even Hamilton ? Now’s your chance to write a play that will leave these two triumphs in the dust. Your Comedy of Job will keep the Broadway lights on for what will seem like forever.” ** David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

“Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” < Back R U Body, Soul or Spirit? David Cowles Dec 1, 2024 “Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” Many spiritual traditions distinguish between body and soul and between soul and spirit . ‘Soul’ is generally considered to be individual, albeit holistic. ‘Spirit’, on the other hand, is universal and shared identically by all. You began life as a unicellular organism, a zygote formed from the merger of two parental sex cells. As a unicellular animal, you interacted with your environment and accomplished tasks, such as reproduction, as directed by a resident ‘software program’ (DNA), consisting of over 20,000 unique instructions (genes). Do you remember being your zygote-self? Probably not. But why not? Because your zygote-self was not conscious? Maybe. Or because you are not your zygote-self? Every cell in your body today is fundamentally identical to, and theoretically interchangeable with, with your zygote-self. Approximately 30 trillion of these proto selves are alive today. Which one are you? All of them? None of them? Watch carefully. It’s a classic game of 3 Card Monte. What we call ‘you’ is not consciousness at the cellular level. The extent to which unicellular organisms may be ‘conscious’ is a matter of intense debate. On the other hand, most of us can agree that at some point between the moment of your conception and the time the last guest left your surprise 30th birthday party, you were at least temporarily conscious, i.e. aware, self-aware, and aware of being aware and self-aware. In other words, you’re a hall of mirrors! You may have asked yourself, “Why is it that I am who I am? Why am I ‘me’ and not someone else? How unique am I, how ‘fine-tuned’? I’m not you; we are not even related as far as I know. But I’ m also not my brother, even though we do share the same parents, and had I been an ‘identical twin’, I would not have been my twin either. If I am cloned someday, will I be that clone and/or will my clone be me? Or will my clone and I each experience ourselves as a different, unique version of ‘me’? Well, news flash: you have already been cloned…trillions of times. It’s called cell division. Remember? You began life as a unicellular animal. Well, that single cell has reproduced and continues to reproduce. In the course of an average human lifetime, the zygote will be copied 100 trillion times with 30 trillion of those copies alive and functioning at any given moment. No one of them is you, but we refer to them jointly as your ‘body’ (or, equivalently, your ‘mind’). Every one of the 30 trillion cells that make up your body houses the same basic genetic code. But different cells express that code differently. Bone cells and skin cells are governed by the same DNA, but they function differently in your body. Theoretically at least, every cell has the ‘potential’ to perform any function within the scope of its code. But not every cell does that. The evolution of the organism known as You requires division of labor. Each of us harbors a miniature version of Bill Belichick in our brains: “Do your job!” Different cells express their common DNA differently. Cells differentiate to form tissues; those tissues develop into organs and those organs work together as a ‘body’, a unified organism, you . What you perceive as ‘you’ are patterns of interaction among the cells that form your body . The question, “What makes me ‘me’?” is non-sensical. The question assumes that there is some sort of distance separating who you are from what you are. What makes ‘you’ you is that you are! ‘Who you are’ transforms ‘what you are’ into you . ‘Who you are’ and ‘what you are’ are your personae; each is just you but under different modes of description. You cannot compartmentalize here. We talk of cells and the networks they form, the tissues that support those networks, the interactions among networked cells, and patterns formed by those interactions. These distinctions are academically useful, but experientially, they are a distraction. The phenomenon of ‘you’ is holistic. ‘You’ has no parts, aspects maybe, but no parts. After some time, the society of cells that constitutes ‘you’ will cease to function as an integrated organism. You will die! The impact on the cellular members of your body will be catastrophic. Over the following minutes, hours, and days all cells associated with ‘you’ will die…well, almost all. A few cells may be able to survive for a time outside the mother ship. Then there’s the matter of your DNA, the Team You playbook. If you’ve been fortunate enough to reproduce, some ‘you-specific code’ will be inherited by the DNA of others. Traces of your ‘software program’ may show up in the code (DNA) of some species a million years from now…or not. But in any case, those immediate and/or remote descendants are not you. When you speak of ‘you’ in a clinical sense, you’re referring to a collection of cells and the inorganic infrastructure that enables those cells to function in a coordinated fashion. So, back to the original question(s): if the details of my conception had been different, however infinitesimally, would I still be ‘me’ or would I be someone else? The answer of course is ‘yes’…and ‘yes’. That ‘person’ would not be the same as the person she would have been if the details of her conception had been different. But on the other hand, she would not be someone else either. She would be who she is, period. Every ‘person’ is unique. No one person can be truthfully compared with any other person. Of course, you can construct artificial scales of comparison: height, weight, age, IQ, et al. But these variables have nothing to do with who a person is, with who you are. The person that is ‘you’ is the same regardless of your size, age, or intelligence. As you grow and age and learn, your personhood remains unchanged. And yet there is no feature in your constitution, that if changed, would make you a different person. But watch carefully. Which cell are you? Now which? It’s a classic game of 3 Card Monte. So what do we call that aspect of ‘you’ that is irreparably identical throughout your lifetime; we call it your ‘soul’. Soul is what remains unchanged regardless of what else changes. You are a single organism. What is subject to change we call your body; what is forever changeless we call your soul. Nothing ever changes but nothing is ever the same; everything changes but nothing is any different. This is the riddle of being a person. Now take a step back. Every soul is unique, but what is it that all souls enjoy in common? Participation in Spirit. You are the holistic sense of self that transcends, but is inseparable from, its elements. You are that by which the whole of you exceeds the sum of you (2 > 1 + 1) and (2 = 1 + 1+ x), where x is a ‘hyperreal infinitesimal’, i.e. a number smaller than any positive real number but greater than 0. You are quite literally unreal …in the mathematical sense of the word. Whatever ‘is’, and enjoys a requisite but unspecified degree of complexity, may be self-aware and exhibit the characteristics we associate with ‘soul’. Your soul is not added to your body, as many of us were taught in Sunday School; rather your soul is your body reimagined . You exhibit characteristics of ‘soul’ because of the ontological fabric in which your cells are embedded. This something in the fabric of being is what we call Spirit. Christians are familiar with Spirit as the Holy Spirit, a member of the Trinity, God and one of God’s 3 personae (persons). For Christians, the Holy Trinity is the source and paradigm of all process. The Holy Spirit is ’Lord, the giver of life’. But the concept of a single Spirit in which diverse entities ‘participate’ is in no way limited to Christianity. It plays a part in many of the world’s spiritual traditions. Let’s unpack this idea! Your soul is the awareness that transcends mere awareness. Call it ‘awareness of self as self’ or ‘awareness of being aware’? As such, it never changes, regardless of the object of your awareness at any one time. Your perceptions are constantly changing but your act of perceiving and your identity as a preceptor never change. Soul is the ‘part’ of you that makes you, you . It is the aspect of ‘you’ that does not change based on its location in spacetime. ‘Soul’ changes nothing; it adds nothing to experience. Yet without it experience is meaningless. ‘You’ are the constant that allows you to experience real solidarity with a far better, 8 year old version of yourself. (Your parents thought they were ‘civilizing’ you; if only they knew!) That’s soul. It’s intensely personal. It is the one person behind every persona, every mask. So you are you, regardless of where or when, location or age. It is reasonable to suppose that you would be you, regardless of the circumstances and details of your conception. In any event there’s only ever one you, so who else are you going to be? Being ‘you’ is being self-aware. Ýou is what is constant across every act of self-awareness. So you are you regardless of your current circumstances, regardless of your life history, and regardless of the circumstances of your conception. But what if the circumstances of your conception include your ‘choice of parents’. We have established that you would be you regardless of which paternal sperm cell impregnated your mother’s ovum. Now suppose you are the product of a different paternal donor; would you not still be you? And if you were also the product of a different ovum? Or a different woman’s ovum. Who would you be then? Who else but you? “I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together.” ( Beatles, I am the Walrus ) So is Soul different from Spirit? Absolutely. Can we reduce one to the other? No way! As many, you are body; as one, you are soul; unnumbered, you are spirit. So how is it that you are you ? Well, again, who or what else could you possibly be? You could, I suppose, be a different you but then you would be that you just as intensely as you are this you and so we’d be having this very same conversation. You are always ‘you’ no matter who you are. You are you no matter what you are. That’s soul . You are you regardless of who you are. That’s spirit . So ‘soul’ is not something added on to something else (e.g. ‘body’). It is simply a way to describe what everyone agrees already is. Materialist models start with the most primitive constituent building blocks (cells, molecules, etc.) and use them to explain more complex, more integrated behavior. The concept of ‘soul’, on the other hand, crops up in connection with models that begin with the organism’s most complex behavior and deduce its constituent elements. ‘Spirit’ is a word used to describe that which all souls share in common. Spirit is a characteristic of Being itself. Participating in Spirit is what it means to be, period , not just what it means to be you . Spirit is more fundamental than body or soul; it is more like a topological feature of reality. It is what makes consciousness possible…and perhaps universal. It furnishes the objective aspect of all ethics: Karma, Golden Rule, Great Commandment. Spirit is the recursive, reflexive aspect of Being per se . It is what makes all else possible…and real. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Yuletide 2024 Share Previous Next 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 God David Cowles Oct 12, 2021 The Creation Story in Genesis makes it clear that ‘Adam and Eve’, and by extension the entire cosmos, are entirely free; otherwise, the idea of ‘creation’ would be a sham. If the cosmos is just a figment of God’s imagination, subject to his absolute control, then it is not ‘created’ at all but just ‘dreamed’. Creation implies that a new entity comes into being that is no longer subject to the will or the whims of its creator. The Creation Story in Genesis makes it clear that ‘Adam and Eve’, and by extension the entire cosmos, are entirely free; otherwise, the idea of ‘creation’ would be a sham. If the cosmos is just a figment of God’s imagination, subject to his absolute control, then it is not ‘created’ at all but just ‘dreamed’. Creation implies that a new entity comes into being that is no longer subject to the will or the whims of its creator. Consider music (or art or literature). When we say that Beethoven ‘created’ his 9th Symphony, we understand that Beethoven retains no control over his ‘creation’. It now belongs to its conductors, musicians, audience and critics. Is God any less of a Creator than Beethoven? However, unlike Beethoven, God may still be able to interact with his creation, not in his role as creator, but in his role as comrade-in-arms. In Marxist terms, God is the ultimate ‘fellow traveler’. According to 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, every event impacts God’s ‘Consequent Nature’ while that same ‘Consequent Nature’ influences every event. In Biblical Judaism, this is represented in the constant dialogue between God and the Patriarchs, Moses and the Prophets. In Christianity it is represented in the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit. In Hasidic Judaism, it is represented in the Shekinah (sparks of divinity resident in every actual entity, i.e. event or object). In contract to Determinism and Deism, Judeo-Christian theology allows God to play an active role in the unfolding of history and the evolution of the cosmos without compromising in any way the ultimate freedom of that cosmos. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Life After Life David Cowles Oct 17, 2024 “Nothing lasts forever. Maybe not even death.” Remember when things were simple? First you were alive, then you were dead. “Those were the days!” (Archie Bunker) Then medicine blurred the lines. ‘Brain death’ replaced ‘cardiac death’ as our preferred criterion; but now things have just gotten a whole lot more complicated! Researchers at Tufts University and the University of Vermont have found that the cells of deceased organisms can live on for substantial periods of time on their own and indefinitely when provided with nutrients, oxygen, and bioelectric or biochemical stimulation. Impressed? Don’t be: this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not all cells need to be reanimated immediately after the death of the host organism. For example, human white blood cells can survive up to 86 hours after organismal death. Muscle cells harvested from mice can be reanimated after as many as 14 days, fibroblast cells from goats and sheep after as long as a month. More astonishing still, these rejuvenated cells, nicknamed ‘xenobots’, have the ability to form multicellular organisms apparently unrelated to the body plans of their original host organisms. Skin cells extracted from deceased frog embryos can spontaneously reorganize into multicellular organisms in which they exhibit behaviors well outside their original biological roles. For example, these ‘second chance cells’ use cilia – small, hair-like structures – to navigate their surroundings. Who says there are no second acts in America? It gets better. Human lung cells can self-assemble into multicellular organisms that repair themselves and any neurons that just happen to be nearby. Apparently, there is such a thing as ‘a born caregiver’. The ability to restore themselves if they become damaged is a natural feature of living organisms, and it is preserved in xenobot biology. Xenobots can close a severe laceration within 5 minutes. These injured cells are able to heal their wounds, restore their shape and continue their work as before. Xenobots are even capable of memory; they have the ability to record information and use that information to modify their behavior. Researchers now hope that these xenobots may be trained to exhibit certain behaviors upon sensing appropriate stimuli. You were hoping your children would exhibit this ability, but that experiment turned out to be a howling failure; now you must place all your hope on xenobots. Can they learn to absorb and break down certain chemicals, especially environmental toxins? Can we train them to synthesize and excrete useful chemicals and proteins in the process? The remarkable plasticity of cellular collectives allows them to form bodies and exhibit behaviors that are quite different from their original organisms - without undergoing any modifications at the DNA level! These cells can spontaneously take on new roles and create new body plans without waiting for mutation and natural selection to work their magic. Perhaps these xenobots have things to teach us. For example, can they help us understand how individual cells naturally come together, communicate, and specialize to create a larger organism? It’s a new model that may provide a foundation for regenerative medicine. Xenobots and their successors may also provide insight into how multicellular organisms arose from ancient single celled organisms, and the origins of information processing, decision making and cognition in biological organisms. Perhaps you’re not as excited by all this as I am. Perhaps you don’t care so much about unicellular life forms. Maybe you’re wondering, “What about me? Why can’t my life be prolonged?” Well good news for you too! A new technology called OrganEx may be right up your street. Basically, OrganEx adds cellular level life support to traditional technologies like ECMO. It revives the body more slowly employing a gentler process of reviving cells that have already begun to die (see above). Turns out those single cell organisms are important after all! To test OrganEx, a Yale University team turned to humanity’s closest non-primate relative – who else but the common household pig? Two monitors, one for the heart and one for brain activity, showed flat lines. The pigs were dead. An hour passed. Then scientists connected each animal to the OrganEx system: heart monitors connected to four out of five pigs began to light up. The hearts’ electrical activity had resumed spontaneously, without chest compressions or other obvious lifesaving measures. What does this mean? With this technology, doctors might be able to extend the amount of time someone could be ‘dead’ before recovering. Minimally, it might make more organs from more bodies recoverable for transplantation. At a cellular level at least, death may not be as quick or as final as once thought. For the person who collapses from a heart attack and remains on the ground for 10 minutes, the findings raise a key question: How dead are they, really? One could imagine using OrganEx after a cardiac arrest. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe not even death. 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! 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< Back Happy Thanksgiving David Cowles Nov 24, 2021 Happy Thanksgiving! Really? With COVID, economic insecurity, terrorism, etc. what do we have to be thankful for? Only everything! Literally…every thing. Being is a function of being good. (Don’t tell that to my 10 year old self.) We ‘are’ only in so far as we are ‘good’. We don’t realize it, but we have a blind spot. Sadly, we are not “all that we could be”. But what is this thing called ‘Good’ that we celebrate this week? It’s God. It’s what makes Being be. It is the yardstick by which we measure everything in our world. But because it is a yardstick, it can’t be among the things that it measures. It must transcend our everyday world. And what transcends our everyday world is what we call “God”. Happy Thanksgiving! Really? With COVID, economic insecurity, terrorism, etc. what do we have to be thankful for? Only everything! Literally…every thing. Being is a function of being good. (Don’t tell that to my 10 year old self.) We ‘are’ only in so far as we are ‘good’. We don’t realize it, but we have a blind spot. Sadly, we are not “all that we could be”. But what is this thing called ‘Good’ that we celebrate this week? It’s God. It’s what makes Being be. It is the yardstick by which we measure everything in our world. But because it is a yardstick, it can’t be among the things that it measures. It must transcend our everyday world. And what transcends our everyday world is what we call “God”. 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 Heresy, Now and Then David Cowles Aug 8, 2023 “The Illuminati prefer their 19th century ideologies to science’s 20th century discoveries… the ‘sin’ of heretics, then and now, is narrowness of vision.” A single thread runs through the Intellectual History of the Western World. It occupied the Pre-Socratics in the 5 th century BCE; it dominated Christian theological speculation in the first centuries CE; and it is a major concern of non-analytic philosophy and theoretical science today: How can we account for the Unity of Universe and the Plurality of ‘things’ (e.g. events) that constitute it? Alfred North Whitehead (c. 1930), the last great systematic philosopher in the Western tradition (Plato through Hegel), grounded his magnum opus, Process and Reality , on this observation: “Creativity, many, one are the ultimate notions.” According to Whitehead, the World is a process (creativity) by which many become one and one becomes many. Whitehead’s project, the conciliation of unity and plurality, is no longer a focus for most philosophers but it has become an obsession for many scientists: The relationship between the Quantum Wave Function and its discrete measurements. The distillation of elementary particles and forces from the Big Bang singularity. The phenomenon of non-locality (Bell’s Theorem, 1964). The hypothesis of Dark Matter/Dark Energy. ‘Cutting edge’ is what’s happening at MIT, not Harvard, at Cambridge, not Oxford. (Ok, a gross overgeneralization…but you get my point!) Bad philosophy, bad theology, and bad science share one feature in common: they cannot accept the radical implications of their own discoveries (viz. Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman ). John Bell, Edwin Hubble, and the early Quantum Mechanics were subjects of the most vitriolic attacks. They had shamelessly shunned Empiricism & Rationalism, the twin pillars of modern Western thought. The reaction of the philosophical and scientific communities made it clear that the Illuminati prefer their 19th century ideologies to science’s 20th century discoveries. Even Einstein weighed in, “God does not play dice!” Sez who? Of course, he does; in fact, he’s a Craps Master . His picture hangs over the pit at Bellagio . Despite a century of effort by “the best minds of my generation” (Ginsberg, Howl ), not a single shred of evidence has been adduced to debunk any of these counter-intuitive models (above). “It’s yesterday once more!” (Carpenters, 1973) We’re back in the early centuries of the Christian Era. The Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) has just put the final stamp of orthodoxy on the Cosmology implicit in New Testament scripture and in the writings of the early Church fathers: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth…I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages…true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father… By the Holy Spirit (he) was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man…I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified…” The theological heretics of that age, like scientific heretics today, could not accept the implications of the orthodoxy that alone can account for our everyday experience of unity, plurality, and creativity. St. Hilary of Poitiers, writing c. 350 CE ( De Trinitate ), called out several heretics by name: ‘On Valentinus, Manichaeus, Sabellius, Hieracas, on Arians, Dasher, Donner and Blitzen’. These men (and deer), much as they disagreed among themselves, all rejected orthodox Christology as defined at Nicaea. Specifically, they could not get their heads around the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. I will not take you through the details of each heresy. Collectively (but not uniformly), these heretics could not accept (1) that Father and Son could both be wholly God, (2) that the Father could beget the Son with no diminution of the Father’s divinity, (3) that the divinity of the Son did not compromise in any way the divinity of the Father, (4) that a Son could be born of the Father and of Mary and yet be co-eternal with the Father, and (5) that Father and Son could be two distinct persons sharing a single substance ( ousia ). The Church is right to condemn these heresies with extreme prejudice. Had any of them prevailed, Christianity would not be the intellectual force it is today. And the heretics themselves? Burn them, of course? Not so fast! Orthodox Christology is a tough sell to any crowd. As Muslims are fond of saying, “God forbid that Allah should have a son.” Hilary’s heretics share a common, dysfunctional ideology: 1 + 1 ≠ 1. When anything (even Godhead) is shared, it must be diluted; when something is one, it cannot be two or three. Similarly, if A is in B then B cannot be in A: ‘a mouse in the house’, not ‘a house in the mouse’. These reservations seem reasonable, and they may indeed apply within a certain range of experience; but the cosmology they represent is inadequate to account for the entirety of that experience. Similarly, Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics ‘work’ within a certain range but do not constitute viable models of Universe. Ultimately, the ‘sin’ of heretics, then and now, is narrowness of vision. Infinity (∞) is, well, infinite, so ∞/2 is still ∞. The Son is the Word ( logos ) of God: “All things came to be through him. Without him nothing that is came to be.” (John 1: 3) But the relationship between God and Universe cannot be vectored (→); it must be reciprocal (↔): covenant, not just commandment. “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God… (and) The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1: 1, 14) The Eternal had to ‘happen in spacetime’ so that whatever happens in spacetime might be eternal. Perhaps Hilary’s ‘heretical five’ should be forgiven for not fully understanding this…but that makes the achievement of Nicaea all the more astonishing. Image: The Pharisees and the Sadducees Come to Tempt Jesus. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper. Created by James Tissot (1836-1902). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous 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 Propagation of Influences David Cowles Nov 21, 2023 ”Just imagine what it would be like if we actually had to take responsibility for our actions…if we couldn’t blame our shortcomings on others. Who could face a mirror?!” Why is it that Event B looks a whole lot like Event A? And why is it that events A, B, and C seem to form some sort of logical continuum? We can only conclude that A somehow ‘influences’ B, which in turn ‘influences’ C, so that the whole chain has a sort of solidarity…or identity. Obviously, I must be talking about Causality here, right? Perhaps…but not necessarily. There are other ways that influences could propagate. For example, events might have a built-in tendency to copy other events (magic…or fractals). Any way you slice it, influences do seem to propagate. Those of you who regularly sample Aletheia Today Magazine and Thoughts While Shaving know to expect the unexpected, so here goes: “Influences do not propagate!” Let’s go back to our original events, A, B, and C. A inherits a multiplicity of events, which it proceeds to organize into a nexus that serves as its launch pad, i.e., its World. A is motivated by ‘universal values’, collectively known as ‘Good’, but often specified as ‘Beauty, Truth, and Justice’. These values stimulate evaluation (and condemnation) of what is and imagination and appetition for what could be. (Bobby Kennedy: “I dream of things that never were and ask why not.”) They are the source of everlasting restlessness at the heart of the spatiotemporal world. The specifics of A’s evaluation informs A’s arrangement of its World, the first step in A’s bold plan to save the Universe. Go, A, go! A is motivated by the universal desire to realize eternal values in the spatiotemporal world, but A is a recursive process that modifies itself as it modifies the world. Sometimes feedback can be perceived as ‘noise’. (Hmm, that sounds eerily ‘familial’.) The result is a trajectory that almost always lands ‘off target’. Been there by any chance? No? Not to worry then! A is not like you and me. We became exactly the people and lived exactly the lives that we set out to become and live at age 5—no hiccups along the way! A is not so fortunate. Yet, every A achieves some measure of its original good intention (no matter how slight), and that becomes A’s ‘satisfaction’. Satisfaction is subjective, but it has an objective face which is projected onto the Actual Worlds of all subsequent events. No surprise here; whatever you’re feeling always has the potential to spill over and impact others in your orbit. B repeats the process. It reacts to A’s multiplicity of events increased by one (by A). But B is free to organize that multiplicity in any way it chooses. For example, it may choose to keep A’s Actual World virtually intact and be guided by the same mix of values; it may copy A’s ‘subjective aim’ as closely as possible. That’s how it is that we experience consistency and endurance in our world. On the other hand, B is free to shake up the mix of values that guided A and set sail for an entirely different destination, dragging A, kicking and screaming, along for the ride. A set off for London, nice, but B is heading for Bora Bora, also nice. Each destination is a manifestation of Good, but each represents a different mix of the Values that constitute the Good. This is how it is that we experience novelty and variety in our world. Bottom line: B rules. A has no control over B. A ‘propagates no influences’; it has no influences to propagate. At best, A can lead by example. A respects B’s autonomy and, to be frank, A is critically dependent on an independent and creative B and C and D to redeem its own misfire. B can be ultra-conservative; it can reconstitute A’s world as best it can and mimic A itself as closely as possible. Or, like a rebellious teenager, it can reject almost everything A represents (‘almost’ because we can never totally escape our parents). Is this sufficiently bizarre for you? Ok, but what’s the alternative? A gossamer net called ‘causality’ draped over the world’s furniture? Well, ok, let’s explore that option. Again, let’s start with A. Upon termination, A is thought to propagate certain influences forward in time, e.g., its momentum. B occurs whenever and wherever the world reacts to (entangles with) A’s momentum (there is no more A per se in this model – it’s past). What about C? In this model, C is an event in the process of development, passively powered by residual influences from events that no longer exist and purposelessly directed toward events that have not yet begun to exist. Isn’t something missing in this model? Where’s the is ? I’m reminded of certain pseudo-math problems that occasionally cropped up in high school - problems where all the variables cancel out, and you’re left with a big pile of nothing. That’s ontology according to the Standard Model. The propagation of influences turns out to be a carefully curated illusion. Understandably so! Just imagine what it would be like if we actually had to take responsibility for our actions…if we couldn’t blame our shortcomings on others. Who could face a mirror! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Be a Prophet! David Cowles Sep 26, 2023 “…As always in human history, it will be prophets like you who will herald change – like roosters summoning the dawn.” You’ve read the Old Testament prophets. Did you ever think, “I wish God would call me?” Well, what’s to say he hasn’t? The role of the prophet is to speak Truth, especially when it’s unpopular…like now! Today, we are all called; literally everyone can be a prophet, but how? Aletheia Today has identified 5 themes from our online publications and turned them into icebreakers - memes that reflect ideas, secular and religious, theological, philosophical, and cultural, that are by now familiar to regular readers of ATM and TWS . Subscribe here . To help you jump start conversations, we’ve selected 3 useful everyday items and emblazoned each item with one of our 5 memes (below), all guaranteed to break through any ice, no matter how thick. Just pick one of our memes, match it to an item from our store , and you’ve already taken the first step on your journey of 1,000 miles. Good luck! Stay safe! Check out our memes: Not God or Man, God and Man - The world used to be full of gods disguised as humans; today, it’s humans impersonating God. Yahweh (‘God’ in Judeo-Christian scripture) is wholly God (Creator) and wholly Human (Savior, Redeemer, Messiah)! In Genesis, “God created the heavens and the earth,” the Cosmos, the material world, ‘the whole shootin’ match’. Then through Mary, Mater Dei , God became an element within that whole. Incarnation turns the Cosmos inside out. The whole becomes the part. That’s solidarity! Shop AT! Think Dangerously - The art of thinking is threatened, but don’t blame today’s AI. Most thinking is done using language, the original AI, the fossil record of other people’s thoughts. Ironically, we refer to today’s AI as Large Language Models (LLMs) – a tip of the cap to the sub-structural role of language in all AI. Was the library at Alexandria the world’s first fully functional LLM? But there’s a problem. Only 3% of what we think is original ; the rest just echoes past ideas. Somebody thought them up once, but it wasn’t you…or me. So why the compulsion to repeat these stale memes, endlessly, ad nauseum ? Be a revolutionary, have original ideas, think dangerously! Shop AT! Smash Idols – “ You shall put no gods before me . ” Idolatry is the root of all sin, putting something ahead of God. It could be a Golden Calf, a Tesla Model X, or a bottle of booze. There’s nothing wrong with gold, cars, or spirits – until they become idols…and then we have to smash them (figuratively speaking of course)! Sorry about your windshield. Shop AT! Exodus 3: 14 - “I am who am.” Moses challenged God: ‘Ok, I’ll lead your revolution against Pharaoh…but first, tell me who you are!’ So, Yahweh utters these four words: “I am who am.” The gods of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Hollywood are beings among beings; Yahweh is Being itself ! Shop AT! Judges 21: 25 - “In those days, there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” After the Exodus, God ruled Israel directly for 250 years; it wasn’t hard. First, there’s Torah, 613 dos and don'ts for daily living. Then there’s conscience – everyone’s direct pipeline to the mind of God. Finally, there are judges , charismatic leaders who step up as needed in every culture to do the work of God. Samuel, Israel’s last faithful judge, warned the people against throwing over theocracy for monarchy: “He (the king) will take your sons and assign them to his chariots (conscription)…he will make them do his plowing and harvesting (civil service) and produce his weapons of war (military industrial complex)…He will use your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers (exploitation). He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves (eminent domain) and give them to his servants (bureaucrats). He will take…your best oxen and donkeys and use them to do his work (nationalization). He will also tithe your flocks (taxation…). As for you, you will become his slaves (…without representation).” (I Samuel 8: 11b – 18) In a single stroke, the people of Israel ceased to do "what was right in their own eyes" and began doing what was expedient in the eyes of another…with predictably disastrous results. Indeed, the entire millennium from Samuel to Jesus can be seen as one long effort to mitigate or reverse the disastrous decision made at Ramah. So tell me now, “Who needs a king?” Shop AT! Judeo-Christianity is revolutionary in every sense of the word: philosophical, cultural, political. It challenges virtually every tenet of our materialist, conformist, authoritarian culture. The Judeo-Christian perspective offers welcome, if challenging, relief from the mind-numbing hum of modern civilization. Perhaps Tracy Chapman said it best in Drive (The Cars): “You can’t go on, thinking nothing’s wrong…” Plenty’s wrong! Regional wars, terrorism, the threat of nuclear holocaust, racism, sexism, poverty, climate change, mass extinction, bioengineered pandemics…shall I go on…or do you get the point? These problems have been millennia in the making, and they won’t be solved overnight. But as always in human history, it will be prophets like you who will herald change – like roosters summoning the dawn: Moses, Lao-Tse, Isaiah, Buddha, John the Baptist, Galileo…you’re in good company! Shop AT! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of an AI-powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . 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 CVS and Consciousness David Cowles Oct 24, 2023 “…Congratulations…you just created your first universe. May I call you God? Or would you prefer Lord of ‘the Ring’?” Riddle : What does a cash register receipt from CVS have in common with an electron, human consciousness, and political revolution? Give up? Answer : They all exhibit 720° symmetry. What? 720° symmetry? That’s ridiculous! You can have 90° symmetry, 180° symmetry, 360° symmetry, but never 720°. That’s just not a thing. The idea itself is ridiculous. I agree with you. It is ridiculous…and yet, it is a thing. May I demonstrate? Next time you visit a CVS, please don’t throw away the mile-long cash register receipt they give you at check-out. Instead, turn it into a loop—but not just any loop—a special kind of loop known as a Möbius strip. Here’s how (not recommended for readers under the age of 3): Hold the two ends of the receipt, one in each hand. Twist one end 180 degrees. Scotch tape the two ends together. Not too challenging, but congratulations anyhow: you just created your first universe. May I call you God ? Or would you prefer Lord of ‘the Ring’ ? But now what can you do with your Precious ? Run your finger along its surface. Keep going. Still going? It’s endless, isn’t it? You’ve taken an everyday rectangle, albeit elongated, with well-defined sides and edges and turned it into a one-sided loop with no boundary. You’ve created what topologists call a ‘non-orientable’ surface. Now pick a spot on the ‘strip’ and imagine an arrow on that spot, pointing up; slide that arrow to the right or left until you come back to where you started (360°). Hmm, something’s different, isn’t it? Your arrow is pointing down now, as if it were a reflection of the original arrow. Of course, it is the original arrow, only now it’s ‘disoriented’, a bit like me after a long night at my local . But no problem! Just keep going in the same direction. Another 360° et voilà , your arrow’s pointing up again. Your universe is symmetrical after all, but that symmetry requires 720° of revolution, not the meager 360°, as in my boring universe. At first, it seems amazing that we can create 720°symmetry in 360° space, but the phenomenon is not as rare as you might suppose. Ever heard of an electron? Electrons have something called spin – the subatomic analog of your finger running along the Möbius strip. We’re familiar with spheroids. Obviously, they exhibit 360° symmetry, right? Not necessarily. Turns out that the electron, and the proton, all massive subatomic particles, in fact, exhibit 720° symmetry. They behave like figures on a Möbius strip, not like baseballs. BTW, just in case you were wondering, massless particles like the photon generally exhibit boring old 360°symmetry, but the graviton is a bit of a twist : it exhibits 180° symmetry. 720° symmetry is important in another context: consciousness. I am aware of a table. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s a real table existing in a material world. Thanks to the properties of my central nervous system, I am aware of the look and feel of this table, but I am also aware of myself, and I am aware of myself being aware of the table. That’s consciousness! But what’s that ? Is it some sort of transcendental substance, a ‘soul’ perhaps? Or is it just another manifestation of a material ‘neural net’? Neither. It’s a topological feature of Universe per se . Like mass and energy, particles and waves, it’s akin to the property of reflection: the universe reflects itself. Apparently, self-reflection is an irreducible property of Being. Perhaps it’s what Being is. That’s not to say that self-reflection is always, or even usually, conscious. Consciousness rises to the level of a phenomenon only in the context of certain well-defined, but currently unspecified, physical structures. Once upon a time, people broke Universe down into ‘mind’ and ‘matter." Gilbert Ryle ( The Concept of Mind ) put an end to that. He demonstrated that that sort of dualism makes no sense. Mind and matter, like mind and body, are just different aspects of one phenomenon. Today our models are more nuanced. But using the old terminology, it turns out that both mind (consciousness) and matter (massive particles) exhibit 720° symmetry. This appears to be the real, deep structure of Being, not the anemic ‘special case’ abstraction we know as 360° symmetry. As usual, we have things upside down! Universe is characterized by 720° symmetry; 360° symmetry is a relatively rare, ‘degenerate’ exception. Yet we’ve mistaken the exception to the rule…once again! We’ve imprisoned ourselves in a ‘toy universe’. We ‘swim’ in Maya . “You say you want a revolution” ( The Beatles )? Well, you’re at home here! And what is a revolution other than the inversion of the socio-economic arrow? Marx said it well: a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. The Psalmists, Isaiah and Mark, did even better: “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” But the prize for Best Said goes to The Who : “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The Theory of Revolution requires that the fabric of society (the political logos ) be non-orientable. How else can we turn an up-arrow down? But, of course that could never happen in the real world, could it? We’ve never seen a revolutionary cadre turn into a new aristocracy, have we? Oh and BTW, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn that has your name written all over it. Let’s chat. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous 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 Philosophy’s 10 Fatal Fallacies David Cowles Aug 19, 2025 “We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality.” Western philosophy is sick. It’s coming up on 100 years since Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre published the last great comprehensive philosophical systems ( Process and Reality and Being and Nothingness ). They did so at a time when most of their contemporaries had concluded that ‘systematic philosophy’ was an oxymoron and that the proper purview of philosophy was limited to analysis . No wonder! 2400 years after Plato, we were still debating the same tired issues…with no resolution in sight. It is only sensible that folks began to ask whether the very notion of philosophical inquiry was flawed, whether ultimate or even relative truth was discoverable, whether metaphysics could ever be meaningful. My own superannuated contemporaries, the ones who kept me up all night in college dorm room bull sessions, have apparently given up. They are content that existence has no extrinsic meaning : “Cultivate your own garden.” (Voltaire) “A man should eat and drink and enjoy himself.” ( Ecclesiastes ) The fault, however, lies not in the stars but in ourselves. We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality! The intellectual and spiritual diseases of the 21 st century – cynicism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism, secularism, relativism, hedonism, et al. – stem in large part from 10 fundamental philosophical fallacies. Scattered across multiple academic disciplines – math, topology, physics, logic, ethics, linguistics, theology et al., these fallacies share one feature in common: they are all intellectually descended from Horatio…not Hamlet. Fallacy #1 – Geometry Euclid taught us that parallel lines do not intersect; well and good! But in the real world, all lines intersect. What originates at a singularity (Big Bang) converges at a singularity (Heat Death: Big Crunch or Big Freeze). Frost’s two roads both lead home and ultimately all roads do lead to ‘Rome’. Euclidean geometry is orientable . A sheet of paper has two sides that never meet. Even if we join two ends of the sheet to make a loop (a BK crown), obverse and reverse remain distinct. In fact, now they also permanently split the world in two: ‘inside the loop’ vs. ‘outside the loop’. Closed geometric figures (circles, triangles, etc.) divide 2 dimensional planes into inside and outside areas separated by an impermeable one dimensional perimeter. Likewise, spheres and polyhedra divide 3-d space into inside and outside volumes, separated by a two dimensional surface. We’ve trained ourselves to take these things for granted. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like this. At least since Heraclitus (5 th century BCE), we’ve known that in the real world ‘everything flows’. Nothing corresponding to Euclid’s orientable model exists anywhere ! Every ‘impermeable’ boundary is in fact a dissipative membrane: Ultimately there are no insides or outsides. All bifurcations are local (temporary) and ‘imperfect’: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Frost) Even protons eventually decay. Consider a living cell, for example. It takes 30 trillion of them to form just one adult human body. Each cell is separated from every other cell and from the rest of its external world by a membrane we misleadingly call a ‘cell wall’. We have developed a complex science to account for the dissipative behavior of this membrane: once thought impermeable, more than a billion molecules cross it every second. The cell ‘wall’ is biology’s Maginot Line…or its ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. In the Real World, all lines intersect, therefore all planes form loops. Conforming to the fundamental topology of the Universe, all loops ‘twist’ to form one-sided Mobius Strips, and every higher dimensional ‘object’ (e.g. a Klein Bottle ) includes an embedded Mobius Strip. The geometry of the Real World is non-orientable . Orientable , Euclidean Geometry assumes 360° symmetry. Rightly so, but only in certain ‘special cases’, e.g. circular shapes and electromagnetic fields. Let X be a point on a circle. Move X 360° in either direction, et voila , X-again. More fundamentally, though, the Real World exhibits 720° symmetry, a characteristic of non-orientable geometries. Tetrahedra, the foundation of all structure (Plato, Fuller), consist of 4 triangles whose interior angles each add up to 180° (180 x 4 = 720). A tetrahedron is the union of two 360° circles (360 x 2 = 720), twisted relative to each other, so that it is impossible to trace the sides of the tetrahedron without going over one side twice. Fermions, the building blocks of all matter, exhibit symmetry only after rotating through 720°. 360° symmetry gives us access to only half a world (one circle) – we’re like Alice before she stepped through the looking-glass. The Higgs Field creates a ‘mirror world’, unknown to the pioneers of Western mathematics: Euclid, Archimedes, et al., through which all matter must pass. Orientability (flatness) is a fundamentally ‘local’ phenomenon. Just as the round Earth appears locally flat, the non-orientable Cosmos appears locally orientable . If you smashed any globally non-orientable Klein Bottle into pieces, each piece (local) would be orientable …but the whole is not. What is true of the Whole is not true of any of its so-called Parts. Parts are always orientable , Wholes never are. (This distinction may define Wholes vs. Parts.) But as we shall soon see ( Fallacy #2 ), there are no Parts, only Wholes exist, Wholes embedded in other Wholes. Fallacy #2 – Topology We are accustomed to thinking of the material world as a hierarchy of Wholes and Parts: “A whole is equal to the sum of its parts”, or is it “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, or “the sum of the parts is greater than the whole?” But in the case of a Klein Bottle ( Fallacy #1 ), what is true of the Whole is true of none of its so-called Parts, taken individually or even collectively. This degree of ambiguity alone should be a clue: something is wrong with this picture! If contradictory propositions about Wholes and Parts are all true, then everything is ‘true’ and therefore nothing is True . In fact, there are no Parts, only Wholes. To be is to be whole and to be a Whole. Some Wholes are embedded in other Wholes but embedded Wholes are not Parts; they are Wholes in their own right, symbiotically embedded. The nucleus of a cell is an independent organism, symbiotically embedded in its host. Same with mitochondria. A human cell in turn is not ‘part’ of a body, it is an independent organism, a Whole, embedded in a broader Whole. These observations lead to four wildly counter-intuitive corollaries: (1) “No two events intersect” unless one is entirely embedded in the other. Unless B and C are entirely disjoint, either B is embedded in C or C is embedded in B. But if one event is embedded in another then they function as a single event. (2) However, if B and C are disjoint, each may be embedded, independently, in A. But in that case, there is no consistent arithmetic relationship (common metric) spanning the volumes of C, B, and A. Even though B and C are embedded in A they are not ‘parts’ of A; so it is not necessarily the case that A > B or A > C or A ≥ (B+C). A, B, and C are independent Wholes, each with its own unique metric. Therefore, the volume(s) of B and/or C and/or (B+C) can be greater than A. The volume of A can even be infinitesimal (hyperreal), or zero, or negative while the volumes(s) of B and C and (B+C) ‘stay positive’…and real. (3) B and C can influence A and A can influence B and/or C but B and C cannot influence each other except through the intermediation of A. A causal relationship ( Fallacy #4 ) is the only relationship between entities (B ↔ C) that is not permitted IRL. The Real World is truly the inverse of the Euclidean World in which all of us live our daily lives. (4) “…it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” (O. C. Smith) We imagine that the Universe pulls itself up by its ‘bootstraps’, that fundamental particles assemble themselves into ever more complex structures: electron → atom → molecule → cell → organism → community → society → the United Federation of Planets ( Star Trek ). In fact there is no pulling up, there are no bootstraps and nothing assembles. There are only Wholes that construct themselves by incorporating qualities manifested by other Wholes. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, “It’s Wholes all the way down.” Fallacy #3 – Space, Time & Scale We are transfixed by the enormity of space and time and by the c. 60 orders of magnitude separating the cosmic event horizon from Planck’s measurements. In fact, however, space, time and scale are just three different axes on which we can conveniently arrange events to illustrate various pathways of inherited order. Time, for example, allows us to arrange events on a grid that corresponds to a desired ordering principle, e.g. increasing entropy. Until 1964, following Einstein et al., we were certain that the speed of light placed an absolute bound on the degree of integration possible in any universe. In fact, we now know that most events (particles) are entangled with other events across vast tracts of spacetime; and between entangled events, spacetime is annihilated – not that information travels faster than ‘c’ but that spatiotemporal separation is simply irrelevant. It is epiphenomenal in relation to substructural entanglement. Space is an ordering principle that allows us to quantify the strength at which various forces are felt by various entities. Re Scale , 60 orders of magnitude may be just what we need to house all the bits of information that currently constitute the universe. Fortunately, the universe is making room for more; it’s expanding. Speculation : Does the rate of cosmic expansion put a limit on our ability to generate new bits of information? Or does the rate of information generation determine the rate of cosmic expansion? Does the advent of AI mean that we could be headed for a new period of hyperinflation? But all of this is purely relative. According to George Macdonald, “Form is much but size is nothing.” And before him, William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” But just exactly how ‘relative’ is it? According to Roger Penrose’s CCC model of cosmology, the isolated photons characteristic of the Big Freeze may be the primordial fluctuations in the CMB that become/became the seeds that drive/drove the formation of galaxies. In fact, the fundamental structure of the World is neither spatiotemporal nor scalar; it’s fractal . There are patterns that occupy regions of spacetime and repeat over and over again with slight variations - at every scale, in every place, in every timeframe. The rotations of the galaxies around their black holes recapitulate the revolutions of the solar system; the nucleated structure of the Eukaryotic cell recapitulates 20 th century models of the atom. Patterns persist; the universe is a many layered onion. Fallacy #4 - Causality “Everything has a cause.” From physics to theology, this premise was virtually unchallenged (lie quiet, David Hume) prior to the 20 th century’s discovery of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos and entanglement. Causality and Ontogenesis have become virtual synonyms. In fact, however, there are no ‘causes’, and therefore no ‘effects’; there are only events . Every event is causa sui and sui generis . Perfectly free and unconditioned, every event occurs in the context of a specific configuration of prior events, i.e. in the context of its own unique Actual World. “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” (Eliot) Every event is a cosmos-filling field, a reaction of the Whole to the Whole, driven by a primordial appetition for The Good, i.e. for Eternal Values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. The probability of any specific event occurring in the Real World is infinitesimal. Yet events do occur. Is this not just another way of saying that every event is miraculous – not a suspension of physical law but the most dramatic possible expression of that law? In every event, the Actual World is both the subject and the object of the event, but it is never the event itself: “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today!” (Carroll) But without Causality , how do we account for the remarkable uniformity we find in nature? I mean, a proton is a proton is a proton…for 10^32 years! Our overwhelming sense of continuity has several independent sources, none of them related to Causality. First , all events are motivated by a bundle of shared values (above) that naturally lead toward a convergent future. Second , while the content of all future events is entirely undetermined, the qualities of the Omega event are certain, i.e. the material realization of the Eternal Values. Third , while every event is novel, no event is entirely new. As noted above, every event is causa sui and sui generis , but no event (except God?) creates ex nihilo . No two events are entirely the same: Creativity is the spark of difference. No two events are entirely different: Solidarity provides a shared foundation. Solidarity does not compromise Creativity; it empowers it. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are massively enhanced by Stability and Continuity. Imagine Beauty without harmony (order), Truth without knowledge (wisdom), Justice without precedent (law)! The creative urge characteristic of the Universe as a whole seeks to realize Eternal Values while maximizing Intensity of Experience. Each event serves its own subjective interests (intensity) as it meets the objective interests (value) of the wider World. The two interests are not necessarily in conflict, but they are distinct. Intensity and value both depend on stability. You can’t high-jump if you’re standing in quick sand. Therefore we assert the following proposition: “All events conserve as much of their inherited Actual Worlds as possible consistent with their overriding objectives of realizing Eternal Values and maximizing Intensity of Experience.” Events are not caused, they are motivated and curated - motivated by appetition for the Eternal Values and curated by the hierarchy of ontological imperatives: Value, Intensity, Consistency. What we experience as Causality is simply the Curation of Novelty. Therefore there is a Prime Directive, a meta-ethics: “Accomplish as much as possible by changing as little as possible!” Qualia are conserved without the phantasm of Causality…and Occam’s Razor is respected in the process. Fourth , we treat events as though they were points in spacetime; they are not. They occupy regions of space and periods of time. (Note: Every event is a World Wide Wave but that wave is concentrated in a defined region of spacetime known as its ‘location’). Within that location each event is holistic. If A is normally followed by B, then A and B are simply aspects of a single event. But we don’t see things that way. We turn events into movie reels. We break them up into static frames scaled to the perceptual requirements of our human anatomy. We practice ‘ontological vivisection’. Sometimes we affix labels like ‘intention’ or ‘tone’, ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ to various frame sequences. But in reality these are all just facets of a unitary phenomenon (the event itself). Finally , we are mesmerized by the concept of Causality itself. Events transform their worlds. It is possible to track the unfolding of events by following the trail of transformations, the gradual flow from lower levels of entropy to higher levels. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we don’t confuse ‘flow’ with ‘cause’. It is also possible to walk the process back, to focus on what is now and backtrack through an imagined sequence of ‘quantum changes’, one following another, until you’re willing to say you’ve reached the ‘origin’. There’s nothing wrong with this either, as long as we don’t confuse ‘sequential’ with ‘causal’. Fallacy #5 - Set Theory Around the dawn of the 20 th century, logic and sets met…and it was love at first sight. Suddenly, everything had to be described in terms of sets. By the time my children were ready for school, even basic arithmetic was taught as set theory. They learned symbolic notation before they learned addition. This was not necessarily a bad thing! Set Theory is a powerful tool. But then Bertrand Russell discovered an apparent ‘paradox’ in ‘naïve set theory’ and ‘fixed it’ by adding a ludicrous new axiom (The Axiom of Foundation). AF states that no set can be a subset (or member) of itself. There are valid sets that are not members of themselves. For example, the set of Real Numbers is not itself a real number. But these sets tend to be inert collections, baseball cards gathering dust on a closet shelf. More fundamentally, the Universe consists of sets that are recursive, i.e. that are members of themselves. Example : the set of physical laws is itself a physical law (a meta-law ). Criteria : (1) Changing the ‘value’ (defined as broadly as possible, perhaps similar to ‘qualia’) of any one member normally changes the ‘value’ of the set itself; and (2) changing the ‘value’ of the set potentially changes the ‘value’ of every member of that set. Rule of thumb : Recursion is characteristic of sets that model organic processes. A universe without recursion is sterile…and very likely impossible. What does it mean ‘to be’, Prince Hamlet? To be a difference that makes a difference. (Gregory Bateson) To be many in one and one among many. (Whitehead); all for one and one for all (Dumas). In pursuit of consistency, Russell sacrificed relevance. IRL, every action is recursive, every action is self-modifying, every action acts on the actor. Fallacy #6 - Arithmetic The rules of arithmetic are powerful, but they are also pernicious. 2500 years ago Zeno proved that arithmetic cannot account for even the simplest real world phenomenon (e.g. the flight of an arrow). The next 2000 years of Western intellectual history may be understood as a coordinated assault on Zeno, triumphantly culminating in the simultaneous discovery of Calculus by Leibniz and Newton c. 1700 CE. Alleluia! The multiplication tables, scourge of 8 year olds everywhere, were finally vindicated. Until they weren’t. 200 years after Newton, Bertrand Russell pointed out that calculus does not resolve Zeno’s paradox after all. Both arithmetic and calculus assume that the real world is continuous, which it is not; it’s discrete, it’s quantized. It’s a foam, not a fluid! Later Godel showed that arithmetic is also incomplete: it inevitably labels certain well-formed propositions ‘undecidable’. I wish I had known about Godel’s work when I was in 3 rd grade. Whenever I encountered a problem too big for my Pooh brain I would have written ‘undecidable’ on the answer sheet (with predictable consequences). According to the rules of arithmetic, ‘operations’ are transitive, commutative, associative and distributive. Translation: a quantity is a quantity is a quantity…regardless of its context. Of course, this is only true in the classroom. IRL, the order of operations makes a big difference. Whenever X + Y = Y + X, it is strictly a matter of coincidence. IRL, nothing is ever divorced from its context and no operation is oblivious to its order. Fallacy #7 - Language We take it for granted that language provides a reasonably accurate map of the real world. It doesn’t! Our contemporary Indo-European languages are almost entirely dependent on action/passive verb forms: i.e. action divorced from reaction. In fact, we’ve known for centuries that “every action entails an equal and opposite reaction” (the very same Mr. Newton), that “what goes around comes around”, that “karma is a b*tch”. Action isolated from reaction imitates the sound of one hand clapping. Once upon a time our Indo-European languages were dominated by a verb form that expressed the reflexivity and interactivity of real process (i.e. the Middle Voice ). However, the technological advances of the bronze and iron ages coopted language into the service of engineering and Middle Voice verb forms atrophied. Who needs the interpersonal when we are exploring the interplanetary? As described in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9), we are left with languages that no longer communicate anything of existential significance. Bummer! Fallacy #8 – Consciousness Some of us imagine that consciousness is a feature of experience unique to human beings. Some think it is associated with an ephemeral substance like the ‘soul’, Gilbert Grape’s famous Ghost in the Machine (Ryle). Still others think that consciousness can be reduced to electrochemical processes. None of these models is even remotely on point. Consciousness occurs whenever one discrete region of the ontological field becomes aware of another such region. I am aware of the people, places, and things around me. A cell is aware of the molecular bath in which it is immersed, a nucleus is aware of the cytoplasm surrounding it, a proton is aware of its companion electron, two entangled photons are simultaneously aware of one another even ‘across the universe’. (Beatles) Contrary to pre-20 th century assumptions, there is no such thing as unconscious awareness (sensation, perhaps, awareness, not). Tweens, relax, there are no zombies! Whenever one region of the ontological field is aware of another region, it automatically becomes aware of itself being aware of that region. Ultimately, all awareness includes self-awareness, so all awareness is conscious. In the real world every ‘actual entity’ (event) is both directly and indirectly aware of its environment – indirectly through being aware of itself being aware. There is an infinitesimal difference between the object of direct awareness and the mediated object of indirect awareness. This is equivalent to what Jacques Derrida called differance . We see the world stereoscopically, resulting in two slightly skew images with a quantum of difference between them. That is where consciousness lives; this is what we call ‘identity’. Therefore, consciousness does not reside in any subject, object, or process; it transcends them all. It is Sartre’s universal Neant (Negation). When Roger Penrose (c. 2010) first proposed that consciousness was a quantum phenomenon, he didn’t know the half of it. We have grown up with the assumption that awareness and consciousness are two different things – and that’s right, sort of. Being conscious is not the same thing as being aware; but awareness automatically entails consciousness. Every action acts on both its subject and its object. An ‘act of awareness’ is no different. When I am aware of X, I am the apparent subject (active voice) of that awareness and X is the apparent object (passive voice). ( Fallacy #7 ) But in fact, as I am aware of X, X is also ‘aware’ of me (Middle Voice). But since I have no access to X’s subjective experience, I experience X’s experience of me as me being aware of myself being aware. I become ‘self-conscious’; I am shy . I channel ‘the other’ (Sartre). Therefore, a conscious being is inherently interpersonal, even if ‘the other person’ turns out to be a stone; been there! (Anaximander, Buber, et al.) The object of my awareness (the world) is in a state of perpetual flux (Heraclitus’ flow); it is coincident with time. The subject of that awareness (‘I’) is in a state of permanent stasis (Parmenides’ Aletheia ); it is atemporal. The object of my awareness is perceived through its qualia ; the subject of my awareness has no qualia : it is one, simple, featureless, eternal. I (object) am different than I was a nanosecond ago; I (subject) am the same as I was at the moment of my conception, the same as I will be at the moment of my death. There is no ‘preferred time’. Self-help gurus notwithstanding, Now is no more real than Then . I am simultaneously and instantaneously who I was, who I am, and who I will be at every moment of my life. I do not need to die to ‘see my life flash before my eyes’; I live that, here and now. YHWH said, “I am what am” (Exodus 3: 14). Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum.” I say, “ I am I” period, a quantum manifestation of eternal, universal Being. I have no ‘hair’ (Hawking). I am Odysseus, I am Nemo, I am Everyman ! I am Consciousness per se but only as it is experienced over a certain ‘defined set of related events’ which Whitehead called a Personal Society…or a Person. Fallacy #9 – Ethics Admit it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment and so we are direct descendants of Machiavelli, no matter how many ‘times removed’. Regardless of what we profess, we all behave as if ‘ends justify means’. And perhaps they would…if they existed. We’ll work a 60 hour week at a job we detest if it enables us to feed our families…or go to Disney World; but would we do so if we learned that our spouse had just won the lottery…or that Disney World was closing? We’ll move to a Ritzy neighborhood we can’t afford so that our kids can go to the best schools. Would we do so if we learned that the school committee was about to fire all the teachers and open a series of open air academies in the Athenian tradition? (Well, maybe I would do that!) And unfortunately, some of us will shoot a passer-by in the street if it gives us the cash we need to feed our tastes, habits, or addictions. But even we might think twice if we knew the passer-by was skint . In fact there are no ends…and so there are no means. Of course, there are prior events and subsequent events but that doesn’t make the former a means or the latter an end . Without Causality ( Fallacy #4 ) nothing can be a means to anything. “Evening came and morning followed, the first day,” (Genesis 1: 5) doesn’t mean that the darkness caused the dawn. But even if you insist on preserving the idea of causality, Machiavelli won’t wash. For something to be a ‘means to an end’ there has to be some sort of ‘intentionality’, i.e. the end must be in sight, if only virtually, at the moment of means . But in fact, the relationship between specific prior events and specific subsequent events is chaotic and therefore essentially unproveable, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Would you raise a colony of butterflies in Borneo so that a certain Cubs game would be rained out? Neither would I. And yet, unlike Indianapolis, it does rain in Chicago in the summertime! It is entirely possible that Bornean butterflies cost the Cubs a trip to the World Series but there is absolutely no way to know that, much less predict it, much less control it. All we can say is (1) there are butterflies in Borneo, (2) a Cubs game got rained out in the 4 th inning with the Cubs leading 10 – 0, (3) the game had to be replayed, and the Cubs lost, (4) the Cubs missed the post season by a single game. So, “Mission Accomplished, Butterfly?” Because there is no knowable, predictable, controllable relationship between prior events and subsequent events, there are no ends . Therefore Ethics , at least since 1500, is not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘absurd’. Imagine a frustrated parent trying to rein-in a houseful of mischievous preteens. Dad decides to post a new set of house rules on the refrigerator door, and he warns of dire consequences if even one of the new rules is broken. However, the rules are purposely written to ensure they will be unintelligible. Welcome to the Enlightenment! There is only one valid ethical imperative: Create beauty, disseminate truth, act justly…all regardless of any so-called consequences. Fallacy #10 – God Our final faux pas, Fallacy #10 , is fittingly a catch-all for a google of fallacies, i.e. the set of all affirmative propositions, actual or potential, that identify God with any specific predicate. The list is endless, because God is ineffable. That said, it is possible to make meaningful statements about God using metaphorical language. It is as if God were Being, Good, Beauty, Truth, Justice, Love, Freedom, etc. Reason allows us to identify these as Divine Qualities and experience shows us that these qualities permeate, however incompletely and imperfectly, the material world. Therefore, they are an epistemologically valid way for us to talk about ‘ineffable God’ using metaphors grounded in human experience. That said, the millennia old debate, “Does God Exist?” is misconceived. First, God is not an existent among existents; ‘God’ is what all existents share in common, God is their foundation. Second, God does not ‘exist’ so much as ‘occur’; like everything else, God is an event. ‘God’ is the name we give to the ‘Bundle’ of ontological features that all actual entities exhibit, i.e. that underlies the phenomenon of Being itself. ( Grammatical Note : All actual entities share certain ontological features, but it is the Bundle itself that underlies Being per se .) Of course, this turns the matter of God’s existence into a tautology. Est ergo Deus Est , or for the Narcissists among us, Sum ergo Deus Est , and for the more spiritually developed, Es Ergo Deus Est . But is that a good thing or bad? Can ‘analytic’ propositions be meaningful? How many angels do stand on the head of a pin? The entire Bible can be read as God’s ongoing but often unsuccessful effort to communicate his nature to the world, climaxing when his “Word (logos) became flesh ( Xpristos ) and dwelt among us.” (John 1: 14) In the end, no one is more misunderstood than God. We pray for signs, for miracles, for God’s intervention in history and in our personal lives, and when we don’t get what we think we’re due, we accuse God of suborning evil . In point of fact, we have substituted an avatar for God, and we have fashioned it in our own image and likeness. We have set up a straw man (‘God is like us’ replaces ‘we are like God’) so that we can indict God when he does not conform to our own ‘high’ standards of conduct. But “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55: 58 – 59) We are agents, we act, we make stuff happen. God does not make things happen; he removes barriers so that good things can happen of their own accord. God is a liberator, not an engineer; like Jeremiah and John the Baptist, we are God’s engineers. Look at Genesis . God said, “ Let there be light;” then God “ saw that it was good.” And only then “evening came and morning followed, the first day.” This is not to limit or demean God in any way. God is everything God could possibly be…consistent with the created world being what it is, i.e. totally and completely free (Sartre). I am not speaking here only of human free will ; I am talking about the existential freedom enjoyed by every single event in Universe. It is through the intermediation of God that the Eternal Values are available to the World as lures for feeling and motives for action. But only we can answer, “Yes!” History is entirely in our hands…and what a mess we’ve made so far. The Eternal Values, God’s essence, are why (not how) there are events. And it is in so far as those fleeting events manifest Eternal Values that the events themselves are timeless. God motivates actions, curates experiences, and redeems results. Cain founds cities, Noah builds boats, Moses leads an insurrection; Joshua fights battles, Solomon builds a temple, Jesus saves! Judeo-Hellenic civilization goes back almost 3,500 years. Ironically, some of the most philosophically impactful works came early: The Book of Job , Ecclesiastes , Parmenides’ On Nature , Plato’s Timaeus , the Gospel of John , and a selection of canonical Epistles, including Colossians , Ephesians , Corinthians , Romans , Hebrews , James , and the letters of John and Peter. A case can be made that the Golden Age of speculative philosophy ended with Augustine of Hippo c. 500 CE. 1500 years later, we’re still debating a lot of the same issues: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Who R U? Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad or morally indifferent people? And, of course, why is there something rather than nothing? What else would you expect? We’ve been looking at these problems through some seriously dysfunctional lenses. Coke bottle bottoms would work better! It’s no wonder that academic philosophy is held in such low repute. For the most part, it takes for granted characterizations of reality that are obviously (above) false. We pretty much need to start over again. But first somebody has to say it out loud, “The Emperor is seriously underdressed.” *** Rodin, Auguste. The Thinker. 1902. Bronze sculpture. Musée Rodin, Paris. 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 How is Government Like Soft Serve Ice Cream? David Cowles Jul 5, 2022 Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Tyranny, even Anarchy, are means of government, not government itself. How is government like soft serve ice cream? – that’s easy! Government comes is just two flavors: Theocracy & Plutocracy. Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Tyranny, even Anarchy, are means of government, not government itself. God rules…or $$$ rules, period. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon (money).” (Mt. 6: 24) The story goes that Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, was asked by a by-stander, “What kind of government have you given us, sir?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” I imagine God having a similar conversation with Moses: “Lord, what kind of government are you giving us?” – “A Theocracy, Moses, if you can keep it.” ( Spoiler Alert : Moses did keep it and passed it on to Joshua and the Judges who followed; but in the end Israel did not keep it!) “I will be your God and you will be my people.” (Gen. 17: 7 et al.) This same covenant formula is reiterated over and over again in the Old Testament. It is Israel’s political constitution …and therefore ours as well. God’s intentions are clear. He wants to rule Israel (his people, us) directly but through the agency of the people themselves: “Government of the people, by the people…” (Lincoln) According to this view, the purpose of ‘government’ is to execute the will of God, period. There is no ‘legislative branch’ because there is no legislative function . All law has already been written for all time (Torah); from here on, it is ‘simply’ a matter of interpretation. Yahweh’s lament : “I created heaven-and-earth and endowed it with freedom. Out of Egypt, I husbanded you across Sinai into Canaan, the Promised Land. I gave you 613 statutes (Torah) guaranteed to bring you strength, health, long life, fertility, and prosperity. Knowing you’re not always the best students, I created some study aids for you, and I encouraged you to use them, even though some would call that cheating. (It is your life’s work to reopen the gates of Eden…so do it by any means necessary!) I wrote the answers on the blackboard…and on the cuffs of your shirt: I emblazoned my will across the cosmos (Nature) and I planted it in your hearts (Conscience), and yet…” In the Saini, God’s rule was mediated by Moses and Aaron and later by Joshua. After the death of Joshua, Theocracy evolved into Anarchy – but that’s not a bad thing! In fact, it was a necessary step toward rule by God through his people collectively . Without the leadership of God’s hand-picked patriarchs, a new social structure took root. To “provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the blessings of liberty,” Judges rose from the ranks. Frequently, a Judge emerged to confront a specific crisis. The Judge’s mandate to govern came from three sources: (1) the Judge’s oath to uphold God’s law (Torah) and (2) the people’s consent to be ‘judged’ and (3) the urgency of the crisis itself. This style of Theocracy worked well (for the most part) for approximately 250 years (1250 to 1000 B.C). Plutocracy, on the other hand, is defined as the rule of wealth . Wealth and power have a symbiotic relationship. Money is fungible. Wealth can be traded for power, and power can be used to amass great wealth. This is the paradigm of a ‘vicious circle.' Look around you! So, to riff on Lincoln: “ All government is government of the people, some government is government by the people, but only Theocracy is government for the people.” Theocracy is not a respecter of persons. Only from God’s vantage can we see that people are not only created equal, but are equal and will always be equal. From God’s perspective, whatever appears to us to be a ‘difference’ is “Vanity!” (Eccl. 1: 2) “Do you know who I am?” – yes, I do; you're dust and ashes. Next… We are all ‘babes,' born of the self-same womb, but in the eyes pf the world, that begins to change almost immediately. Disparities of genetic programming and social circumstances lead to differentiated levels of wealth & power; but in God’s eyes, nothing changes, ever. ‘Equality’ is eternal! Therefore, God and only God is qualified to rule. Only God can rule for the people , all the people because it is only before God that we are truly equal. To paraphrase Deuteronomy, “I set before you Theocracy and Plutocracy; therefore, choose Theocracy.” Few do! Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Job and the Problem of Evil David Cowles May 27, 2025 “Once Scripture is understood…on its own terms and not those imposed on it…one can only ask, What problem of evil?” In most editions of the Bible, the Book of Job is suspended between Torah and the New Testament , i.e. between Genesis and Revelation . Its position is apt. It is a lengthy (over long?) meditation on the Problem of Evil – a ‘problem’ introduced at ‘Creation’ (Genesis 1 – 3) but resolved by the ‘Resurrection’ and the ‘Apocalypse’. If this sounds surprisingly simplistic, it’s because it is. Nevertheless, the Problem of Evil is cited by non-believers as the number one reason for their rejection of Judeo-Christian theology. It was also the rationale Bertrand Russell relied on in his best-selling, Why I am not a Christian . Why the disconnect? It begins, unfortunately, with our understanding ( mis ) of the story of creation itself. The popular image of God shouting commands into an abyss is anti-Biblical…and a bit ridiculous. No wonder folks don’t believe. It is important to remember that YHWH said, “ Let there be light.” ( Genesis , 1: 3) He did not say, “Light, be!” as most people seem to think. He was not a frustrated parent barking at a naughty child; nor was he a raging motorist, yelling, “Start, you sucker!” at his stalled automobile. Rather, he was a compassionate curator ! Nor did he imagine that light would obliterate the primal darkness (“…the earth was without form with darkness over the abyss…” – v. 2). Instead, we learn that God merely “separated the light from the darkness” (v. 3). Later, in the Gospel of John , we celebrate the fact that “the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 5) Phase #1 of the creation process was not complete, however, until “God saw that the light was good” (v. 4) and “Evening (darkness) came and morning (light) followed, the first day.” (v. 5) All of which raises an obvious question: Why would an ‘omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent’ God need to ‘wait and see’ before determining that created light was a good thing? Could God have created something that was not good ? Would God need to pause and assess developments before rendering judgement? In a sense the whole so-called Problem of Evil is addressed and resolved in these first 5 verses of this first Bible book. All the stuff about God’s ‘omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence’ comes later and, for our purposes right now, is beside the point. The testimony of Genesis is clear: God’s hands are clean! Not so, the Book of Job . Here God is put on trial, charged with fostering evil . Job has quite literally staked his life, his health, his family, his fortune, and his reputation on the verdict. But our hero has a tough ‘row to hoe’. God is represented, albeit incompetently, by a ‘dream team’ consisting of three ‘wise men’ and a ‘fool’. Speaking of ‘fools’, Job appears pro se ; he has himself for a lawyer. Worse, God is not only the defendant but also the judge and jury. Can anyone say, “Conflict of interest?” The trial raises every imaginable legal issue. Does Job have standing to sue God? Can God even be sued? Can God be compelled to come to court? If the court were to rule against God, how could it enforce its verdict? How could it impose a sentence on the Creator of Heaven and Earth? Now the matter of God’s ‘omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence’ takes center stage. Unlike Genesis , Job presents the Problem of Evil in its more familiar trappings. A full account of the proceedings are available elsewhere on this site. Suffice to say, the procedural issues are resolved to the satisfaction of both parties and, in a stunning reversal of fortunes, God finds against himself and restores all of Job’s assets plus damages . Job is underwhelmed. He expected this outcome all along. His problems were merely procedural. Once the trial commenced, Job trusted that he would prevail. Even the obvious conflict of interest didn’t concern him. God on the other hand, perhaps sensing the weakness of his position, tries to bully Job into withdrawing his suit. But Job will not budge. He meets God’s bluster with his trademarked ‘frustrated patience’. He has faith that justice will out, i.e. if he holds his ground, the court will ultimately have no choice but to rule in his favor. Job did not believe that God’s nature would allow him to act unjustly…and he was right! Right trumps wrong after all. But the court’s decision applies just to this one case; millions of Job’s fellow sufferers, while buoyed by the trial’s outcome, remain mired in pain. The final resolution, the cosmic solution, comes in the New Testament’s Resurrection narratives and in the Book of Revelation . Here we learn (after the prophet Isaiah) that God is our fellow traveler, that he suffers ‘the whips and snares of time’ alongside us, via compassion and ultimately, via Incarnation. He is born, tiny and defenseless, into our world at our level. He endures in full the pain of mortality ending in a slow and painful death on a Cross. Clearly, our God is no wimp! But had the story ended at Cavalry, we’d be in rough shape; it didn’t! Jesus overcame mortality, pain and death via his Resurrection and eventual Ascension into Heaven (where he sits at the right hand of his Father). Finally, the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation , describes in minute detail, albeit in coded symbolism, the process by which evil will be eradicated, root and branch, from the World, and our primal Paradise restored, fulfilling Paul’s assurance that God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15: 28), pan in panti ( Anaxagoras ) Once Scripture is understood in this way, i.e. on its own terms and not those imposed on it by non-believers, one can only ask, “What problem of evil?” Image: Blake, William. Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils. c.1826. Ink and tempera on mahogany, 326 x 432 mm. Tate. Presented by Miss Mary H. Dodge through the Art Fund, 1918. 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.