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Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. < Back Magesh Contributor Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Navigating Easter to Pentecost Choices that Lead to D eception The Trajectory of AI: Balancing Promise and Caution Mentoring for His Kingdom Credit Where Credit is Due The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music Drumming to Inner Peace

Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? < Back Serenity Prayer David Cowles Sep 1, 2022 Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? The Serenity Prayer , regularly recited before meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and in many other venues around the world, has become part of our shared spiritual heritage. When I first heard it, I was appalled! I mean, check it out: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” To my tween ears, these words reeked of quietism : accepting things as they are, being grateful for what you have, honoring your parents (and others ‘in authority’), etc. This was everything I resented, everything I was beginning to rebel against. Who prays for this? As I grew older, I imagined (myself) that I was defying authority, battling evil against all odds, bravely ‘speaking truth to power.' I tilted at windmills, dreamed impossible dreams, and calmly prepared for inevitable martyrdom. But after years of ‘tilting’ (in more ways than one), I began to see the wisdom in what I had so viscerally rejected decades earlier. First, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was not the person I imagined myself to be: not now, not then, not ever, never! Then I began to recognize that the Serenity Prayer , so hated at first hearing, included insights I had already embraced from other sources. Eventually, I came to see that the Serenity Prayer is actually a riff on the Lord’s Prayer, especially its dramatic climax: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.” Ask Christians what part of the ‘Our Father’ they find hardest to understand, and many will quickly cite this verse. But interpreted through the lens of the Serenity Prayer , the difficulty vanishes. What is temptation ? We are tempted when we consider using one part of the world, something good-in-itself, as something other than its ‘best self.' We are tempted to go ‘off label,' as they say in the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, we are tempted when we consider turning gasoline into Molotov cocktails, using drugs, not to cure diseases, but to get high, and using science, not to make life better for everyone, but to make implements of war. Less dramatically, food is good, gluttony is not; conviviality is good, drunkenness is not; sex is good, promiscuity (may not be) is not, etc. But really, what’s so bad about these things? Everyone has temptations, most of us give (into) in to them, but who cares really - for the most part no one gets hurt – and as my grandfather used (today) to say , “100 years from now no one will know the difference.” Or will they? Do our ‘venial sins,' our peccadillos , matter? Back to the text: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.” What is this ‘Evil’ and why is it so uncomfortably juxtaposed next to ‘temptation’? Did Jesus make a mistake? Did he drop a line? Did he miss a cue off his teleprompter? Do need to reshoot the Sermon on the Mount? “Sermon, take 2.” Or did Jesus mean exactly what he said? Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? Are Evil and Temptation really kissin’ cousins, as the Lord’s Prayer seems to suggest? They are…but not for the reasons we were told as kids! We ‘yield to temptation’ when we ‘misuse’ something, when we pull something out of the intricate tapestry we call ‘reality’ and give it outsized importance in our lives, i.e., when we put anything (even God) on a pedestal. When we are tempted, we begin to see the world as a collection of parts, not as an integrated whole. When we yield to temptation, we use one or more of those parts against the whole. “It’s not fair! I pulled just one little string out of this enormous fabric – I just wanted to admire its bright color and its sheen – et voilà , the entire tapestry has unraveled at my feet. And I wasn’t doing anything that bad!” You’re half right. Assigning something undue importance in the scheme of things, allowing it to determine your behavior, that is evil. It violates the First Commandment (no idols) and ‘both halves’ of the Great Commandment . When it comes to sins, this one scores the hat trick . But why? It doesn’t kill anyone, it doesn’t destroy the world; what it does do is ‘put strange gods’ above YHWH, who is “all good and deserving of all our love." Today, I notice you brought pate en baguette for your lunch. I love pate; when your back is turned, I steal your sandwich (and eat it). A good thing-in-itself, I turn it into an idol. Even if only for a moment, I have put my love of inanimate pate ahead of my love of you and ahead of my love of God. In New Testament terminology, I have traded ‘the living bread’ (God) for ‘bread that does not satisfy’ ( pate en baguette ). (John 6: 51 – 58) I have sinned against God and against ‘my neighbor’ (you); but neither you nor God is the real victim here. After all, I can’t do anything to diminish God, and one pate sandwich won’t diminish you by very much. (In fact, just between us, a little ‘diminishment’ on your part might make a certain cardiologist I know very happy. No need to thank me!) No, the real victim of my crime…drum roll please…is me! Good is the essence of God. Values are refractions of God’s Goodness. The values we find in the spatio-temporal world are reflections of God’s values. I am made in God’s image and likeness, so my value is also a function of God’s value. When I yield to temptation and eat your pate sandwich, I am putting your sandwich ahead of YHWH in the ontological hierarchy of the universe. I have tried to diminish God, but God cannot be diminished. I only end up diminishing myself. “Pate is my shepherd; I shall not want.” (Psalm 23) I have a new god, and so I have made myself a reflection of that God. I am chopped liver! I am tempted to pull on just one string in the tapestry. When I do that, the tapestry may begin to unravel. That ‘unraveling’ is what Evil is! Scientists call this unraveling entropy. I ask God not to let the beauty of his world tempt me to turn its parts into idols. Then I ask God to “deliver us” from the ‘great unraveling’ which is Evil. Now back to the Serenity Prayer : “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There are things about the world (which includes my own body) that I cannot change. For example, I cannot make myself taller than I am. My height (and other physical limitations) is something I need to accept; that’s Serenity! On the other hand, I can break open my piggy bank and use the proceeds to buy the best pair of ‘trainers’ I can afford; I can practice my vertical leap (and other skills) every day. Hardest of all, I can ignore the taunts of others (“look at the midget trying to play basketball”) and their ‘discouraging words.' That’s Courage! As if I were on a post-apocalyptic battlefield, I see wreckage strewn everywhere, wreckage wrought by folks trying to change things they can’t and wreckage of folks failing to change the things they can. I need to move through the skeletons of moral warfare without tipping to one side or the other; that’s Wisdom! 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. Previous Next Share Do you like what you just read? 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< Back Returning to Andromeda David Cowles “What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way!” It’s time for me to return to my home planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. For over a year now, I’ve been researching intelligent life on Earth and documenting suspected occurrences. I think I’ve done good work here, but I know my superiors are going to want a lot more from me than just a collection of anecdotes. They’ll want to know what intelligent life forms on Earth think about themselves and Universe and their place in that universe; and frankly, I’m at a loss to know what to tell them. Got a minute? Can I explain my conundrum? Maybe you can help! For the most part, Earthlings agree on the ‘data’, what happened and when, but the way they interpret that data sorts them into two possibly irreconcilable camps. First, the data: At the birth of time itself, an event occurred which everyone affectionately calls ‘Big Bang’. Then in the first fraction of a nanosecond, that universe ‘inflated’ by a factor of 10^26…to the size of a small marble. Over the next three seconds, all the forces of attraction and repulsion and all the known subatomic particles, in other words all the building blocks of the universe, precipitated . The Universe cooled from 10^32 degrees Kelvin all the way down to a chilly 10^9, still 100,000 times hotter than Earth’s Sun, but below its own ‘dew point’; and below its dew point, the universe rains fermions and bosons. Crazy, right? Well, hang on, we’re just getting started. As you know, the universe is incredibly fine-tuned. It depends on dozens of apparently unrelated parameters; a variation of less than 1% in the quantitative value of any one of these parameters would have aborted the universe sometime during its first three seconds. Over the next 14 billion years or so, the universe ‘gradually’ expanded to its current size (45 billion light years across); the subatomic particles and their related forces combined to form elements, then molecules, then galaxies, and finally, black holes. The first three seconds were incredibly eventful! Then, nothing much happened for the next 10 billion years. Oh, galactic sheets formed along with stars, planets, and moons; new, heavier elements emerged, and together with hydrogen, combined to form an inconceivably vast array of molecules, exhibiting many bizarre and unexpected properties. In other words, yada, yada, yada… Then came the next Big Day! I call it ‘Big Bang 2’. A little less than 4 billion years ago, precursor molecules (organic) combined to form the first (and only) living organism; et voila, biogenesis. Biogenesis happened almost as suddenly as cosmogenesis. One day lifeless, next day life! No wonder Earthlings are dizzy! At least as far as Earthlings know, reproductive ‘life’ can only occur in the presence of DNA, a single molecule painstakingly assembled from a ‘string’ (actually a ‘double helix’) of molecules. DNA is made up of just 4 molecules, bases, arranged ‘vertically’ in triplets and ‘horizontally’ in pairs. No big deal, right? Except that an average DNA molecule consists of three billion base pairs. A change in the composition or position of a single base pair may (or may not) impact the phenomenal characteristics of the host organism. So, kind of a big deal, after all! So far, so good, right? But here’s where things start to get interesting. Some Earthlings believe that ‘life’ arose independently on many different planets and moons across many different galaxies; they tend to underestimate the nearly incalculable precision required to generate a single living organism. Others believe that life evolved only once…on Planet Earth; they tend to underestimate the vastness and variety of the universe. Of course, Earthlings have no access to any real evidence either way. Here’s where you’d like me to step in and give my ‘study subjects’ additional information that might help clear things up for them but, of course, I can’t do that: I am prohibited by the Prime Directive from sharing any information with Earthlings that they have not already discovered on their own. I’m told, “Lose lips implode galaxies!” So my lips, unfortunately, must remain sealed. So this welter of seemingly disconnected ‘facts’ forms what Earthlings call their ‘Standard Model’ (of cosmogenesis and of biogenesis). These ‘models’ are widely accepted; but their interpretation is an entirely different matter. Sidebar : While most Earthlings accept the Standard Model , some prefer a version of that model that telescopes the entire process down to 7 days. Potato…potato! Now things get interesting. Consensus turns to conflict, sometimes armed combat, once the discussion moves from science to philosophy. So far, we’ve focused on the ‘what and when’ of things…that’s the easy part; but now that we’re starting to look at the ‘how and why’, it’s a very different story. Here, seemingly, the human population splits into two apparently irreconcilable camps. One crowd takes the science at face value. It is what it is. There’s no need to look further. Universe just is! WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get. We’ve pushed the envelope to the limit of its elasticity. In the language of Earth’s scholastic philosophers, Universe is causa sui . It has no proper cause; it is the product of no agency. You are your own grandmother. Shut up and enjoy! Or not, suit yourself. Perhaps this is the only possible universe (the Anthropic Principle), or perhaps it is the best of all possible universes (Leibniz), but in fact, no one knows, and no one can know, and no one could do anything about it if they did know. So all you can say is: This is how it is! The other camp takes a very different view of the same data. “ Causa sui …phooey!” Obviously, something as complex as Universe must be the result of an intentional act by a supremely creative intellect. Earthlings usually refer to this ‘creative intellect’ as ‘God’. The ‘God Hypothesis’, as I call it, is potentially useful; but perhaps it raises as many problems as it solves. Who is this God, and why did he exercise his creative intellect in just this way? If this impossibly intricate universe is the product of a creative intelligence, why is everything so messed up? That question splits itself into two versions. The first is the age-old Problem of Evil . As I write this report, tens of thousands of human beings have just died horrible deaths as the result of an earthquake in Turkey. Many were crushed to death, others smothered, others buried alive. The ‘lucky’ survivors had to wait to be rescued, immobilized and without food or water for as much as a week. If Universe is the intentional act of a creative intelligence, is that intelligence malevolent? As in Earthlings’ Book of Job , should God be brought to the dock to face charges of Crimes Against Humanity? (If you’re interested in the outcome of this ‘trial of the millennium’, I recommend an article in Issue #1 of Aletheia Today Magazine , " The Riddle of Job .") But I don’t want to get into the ‘Problem of Evil’ right now. If you’re interested, check out " The Problem of Good ." also in Issue #1 of Aletheia Today Magazine . In any event, it is the less challenging version of our problem. The second version is of much greater concern. If God is benevolent and created Universe, why did he do such a lousy job? I’m passing over God’s alleged crimes against humanity so that I can focus on a much more serious crime, cosmically speaking, the crime of Littering. What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way! Sidebar : What’s happening to me? Have I spent so much time on Earth that its values (or lack thereof) are rubbing off on me? What does it say about me that I condemn careless inefficiency over intentional cruelty? Anyway, according to the Standard Model, genesis is nothing but a bunch of wrong turns. It’s like a stopped clock – it’s only right twice a day. 24 hours of noise gets you two bits of information! For example, genes mutate randomly. Almost all such mutations are harmful to the host species and therefore do not pass on to future generations. Once in a great while, a particular combination of mutations works to produce a new phenomenal characteristic that confers a selective advantage on its host species. Such mutations may be conserved and passed on. The universe as is cannot possibly be the intentional product of a creative and benevolent intelligence… unless that intelligence has done a brilliant job of covering its tracks. But if so, for what purpose? Just to fool the already cognitively impaired members of Homo sapiens ? So, I am faced with the fact that Earthlings understand the common data in two diametrically opposed ways. The Standard Model, by itself, is hardly convincing, and it’s anything but beautiful. Some Earthling once wrote, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.” If that’s so, goodbye Standard Model! Where’s Occam’s Razor when you’re so desperately in need of a shave? At first glance, the so-called ‘God Hypothesis’ looks more appealing. For one thing, it allows for the operation of real, objective values (e.g., Beauty, Truth, and Justice) in the creation and maintenance of Universe. It allows Einstein to claim, rightly or wrongly, that Universe has a built-in bias toward Good . For another thing, it solves the problem of ‘particularity’ – how is it that something as precisely tuned as the cosmos and the biocosm came to be just the way it is? The answer is simple, “God made it that way.” But if so, why does it look like it came about by blind chance? As if this were not enough, I have another problem! Earthlings have a useful epistemological principle that could apply here; it takes various forms: “Actions speak louder than words; by their fruits you shall know them," etc. In other words, don’t tell me what you believe; show me! Is Universe the product of spontaneous generation, i.e., a random, purposeless accident? Or is it the brainchild of an intelligent, powerful, benevolent Creator? Naively, one would expect that people in Camp #1 would behave somewhat differently from those in Camp #2 – and so they do…but only on the margins. There are living members of genus nihilist, as there are of genus credulous . The problem is, there are only a few of each. The actions of the vast majority of human beings don’t betray an allegiance to either ideology. Some label themselves ‘theist, idealist, spiritual’; others prefer ‘atheist, materialist, secular’. Can you tell me who is in which group by examining the way they live their lives? I can’t! Avowed theists are capable of unimaginable cruelty. Avowed atheists are capable of incredible charity. Absent, the one-percent at either end of the spectrum, people don’t seem to care one way or the other about these issues. They deny the existence of God but behave like Mother Theresa; or they affirm the existence of God but behave like Josef Stalin. To the extent they care at all, human beings seem to wall off their cosmological ‘beliefs’ from their terrestrial ‘duties’: Church is for Sundays while business…is ‘just business’. Or do I have it backwards? Should I have said, ‘cosmological duties’ and ‘terrestrial beliefs’? Either way, there’s a disconnect. I am particularly intrigued by older Earthlings, many of them retired from what they call ‘the daily grind’. As far as I can tell, most of them are spending their final years perfecting their golf swings, travelling to exotic destinations, or seeking out hidden culinary gems. Few see ‘financial freedom’ as an opportunity to turn their attention from the ridiculous to the sublime. Recently, many have taken to enshrining their post-retirement activities in the form of something they call a bucket list , a compendium of things they hope to experience before... You’re 75 years old and now you want to see the Grand Canyon? Why? To check it off some imaginary list? To say you’ve seen it? After all, you’ve lived on Earth for 75 years. How can it be that you haven’t even seen the Grand Canyon, or eaten a meal in Paris, or shopped in a Kasbah! What a waste of a life…or not! The best explanation I can come up with is that Earthlings regard their lives as ‘works of art’. Prior to age 25, they are priming the canvass. From 25 to 65, they lay in the broad strokes. After 65, it’s time to add the finer details. To what end? Have they even read their own poets? “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look upon my works ye mighty and despair…nothing beside remains.” (Shelley) What is the purpose of this finished product humans call ‘a life’? It’s not for God, they’ve ruled that out; and it’s not for others, obviously. People seem hell-bent on making themselves for themselves . The competition characteristic of the commercial realm spills over into the existential. I am ‘better than you’ if I have ‘more’ experiences than you. But what does it mean to ‘have more experiences’ than someone else? Longer life? (Is life an endurance contest?) More variety? (Is life a travelog ?) Greater intensity? (Or should I say, “Cheap Thrills” ) ? I heard one person describe life as making memories : but memories for what? Making memories, some no doubt painful, that will shortly be erased? Is life a punishment? (A ‘bad boy’ is made to write 25 humiliating sentences on a blackboard, and then later that same day is made to erase them.) I am told that once upon a time, things were different: humans regularly devoted their later years to prayer, study, and various spiritual practices. Well, no more! Teenagers talk freely about ‘the meaning of life’, but not seniors! In fact, it is considered déclassé for an older person to raise such concerns, even in casual conversation. It is considered morbid, a memento mori for a society that has effectively lost sight of its mortality. So, I must report that human beings are split into two diametrically opposed factions when they consider ‘the ultimate question’: what’s it all about, Alfie? (Title of a movie from the 1960s.) But must I also report that they don’t really care about the answer? For the most part, they live their lives as they want to live them, with no regard for where those lives fit into the totality of things. Curious, don’t you think? This is the spot where you’re wondering if I know something that you don’t. Come on, admit it! Well, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but either way, as you know, I can’t tell you. I am prohibited by the Prime Directive from sharing any information that might prompt folks to change their behavior. So I’m afraid you’ll have to figure things out for yourselves…if there’s anything to figure out…and I’m not saying there is! BTW, I appreciate the hospitality you’ve shown me throughout my stay. I’ll find a way to muddle through my report. In the meantime, my thanks to all of you…and good luck with your quest! Image: Perseus and Andromeda (1720). Hendrick Jacob Hoet (c. 1693–1733). Credit: The Bowes Museum. 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 Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Voice Verbs David Cowles “I am stuck on Band-Aid ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” So says the jingle for one of the world’s most iconic products. But more importantly, and quite unexpectedly, this slogan is one of the best examples of ‘middle voice thinking’ in American pop culture. “I am stuck on Band-Aid ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” So says the jingle for one of the world’s most iconic products. But more importantly, and quite unexpectedly, this slogan is one of the best examples of ‘middle voice thinking’ in American pop culture. We are used to sentences built around active (or passive) voice verbs. (The passive voice is just the active voice turned around.) ‘Billy hit Tommy’ and ‘Tommy was hit by Billy’ describe the exact same event but each with a different focus. The active voice puts the focus on Billy (the one who hit) while the passive voice focuses on Tommy (the one who was hit). But what about the more likely scenario that Billy and Tommy are simply fighting. In English, we have to say, “Tommy and Billy hit each other.” Clumsy! Other languages, especially ancient languages, often include a third voice, the ‘middle voice’. If English had a middle voice, there would be a form of the verb ‘to hit’ that would convey simply the ‘middle voice’ reality of this event. In Icelandic, the language with a middle voice that is closest to English, you usually just add ‘st’ to the end of the root verb to make it middle voice: “Billy and Tommy hitst,” for example. The band-aid jingle highlights this dilemma. Is the bandage stuck on you (active voice) or are you stuck on the bandage (passive voice)? Or are you and the bandage ‘stuckst’ (middle voice)? See how the active and passive voices distort slightly what happens with a band-aid. It takes a middle voice verb form to properly convey what is actually going on. So, who cares? Well, we all do or at least we all should. The current active-passive dualism makes us prone to think in categories such as ‘maker-made’, ‘employer-employee’, ‘ruler-ruled’. I’s exploit it’s. For some purposes, the dominance of active/passive voice verb forms may make practical sense. After all, this is the language of the industrial revolution: skyscrapers and assembly lines. But it is decidedly not the language of interpersonal relations. The philosopher Martin Buber called the proper relationship between two persons ‘I thou’ (rather than ‘I it’). ‘I thou’ is Buber’s way of introducing middle voice thinking into languages (German and English) that do not have a middle voice verb form. One of the most profound lessons of the New Testament is that what I do to another is simultaneously done to me. I am both the subject and the object of my actions. But without a middle voice verb form, we Anglophones have no easy way to express this ethos – and therefore we tend to lose sight of it in our everyday lives – at immense personal and social cost. Previous Next

< Back Follow the Science “Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis. But the universe is also conservative…” David Cowles Remember the Alamo and Follow the Science – words to live by, memes that inspire generations! We love science…and why shouldn’t we? I lived through all the painful and potentially lethal childhood diseases; today we have vaccines. I grew up without the “vast wasteland” (Newton Minow) known as ‘television’, and no video games. Quelle domage! How did I ever survive? When I wanted to know something, I had to travel to something called a ‘library’ and search through its stacks. Then I learned to ‘Ask Google’ to assemble relevant research materials for me. Now I can just wake up my bot, Claude, and he will do my research for me. He’ll even write my report for me if I choose. So follow the science? You bet! There is just one small glitch: not a single proposition in the ‘library of science’ is true! Or false, for that matter. Not one. Take calculus, for example. Without calculus, it is unlikely that any of the technological advances mentioned above would have occurred. The world appears to be continuous along all four dimensions, but it isn’t. This is the nub of the famous paradox proposed by Parmenides’ pal, Zeno of Elea, a mere 2,500 years ago. Calculus can do what Zeno couldn’t; it lets us treat the discontinuous as if it were continuous. It’s not true, of course! Discontinuity is still discontinuity, but calculus allows us to disregard that discontinuity and treat all phenomena as continuous. It’s a bit like geometry. As far as we know, there are no purely Euclidean universes. Yet, the postulates and theorems of Euclidean geometry have revealed much about the substructural order of the phenomenal world. “Something there is that does not love a wall.” (Robert Frost) There are no straight lines! Yet by studying the properties of straight lines, we can learn about that which is not so straight. Euclidean geometry assumes a flat universe in which lines can be straight and angles can be sharp. We don’t live in such a universe, but we can learn about our universe by studying Euclid’s pseudo-verse. Same with calculus! Same with science! Modern science studies with unimaginable depth and precision something that does not exist, i.e., a continuous world. Scientific Method (SM) allows us to probe the world with incredible precision. Anyone who made it through the 5 th grade knows the details of SM by heart: Observe, question, hypothesize, experiment, and interpret. And if you were too cool for school, you know that anyway (without the labels) because you’ve lived…likewise many of your unstuffed animal friends. The fundamental premise of SM is this: If you perform identical actions in an identical environment (e.g., laboratory), you will achieve identical results. SM is ‘AA certified’: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So the non-thetic scientific method is a hardwired feature of epistemology in our biosphere. Perhaps it is a product of evolution (physical and/or cultural); it certainly confers ‘advantage’ on those able to use it. But the whole house of cards rests on a normally unnoticed and unstated foundation – the assumption that any event can ever be repeated. In fact, every event is unique. It is a fundamental premise of ontology (Whitehead), the foundation on which all science must be built, that no two events can ever be the same. If they were, they would be one event, not two. ‘Same’ is a mathematical concept (‘equality’), not a physical reality. But there are no identical events, and therefore it is never possible to perform the same actions under the same circumstances. The scientific method is logical and practical, and it yields amazingly useful insights, but its propositions are utterly vacuous, fruits of a forbidden tree. SM is a useful epistemology that rests on an invalid ontology! “This is what a unicorn would look like…if unicorns existed.” Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis . But the universe is also conservative….just conservative enough, as it turns out. If it were more conservative, we’d be in permanent gridlock; less conservative, chaos. Consider Events A and B. Let’s assume that B is as similar to A as any event can be to any other event. They are separated by a ‘quantum of difference’ - what Jacques Derrida called ‘ differance ’. Where do we find this ‘B’? Next to A, obviously. Dah! Neat trick! How’dya do it? Spacetime! Not a substructural feature of universe as we had long believed but rather a map of that universe. Spacetime is not the substructure of universe - it is a map, not a blueprint. Every map is the projection of a field according to a map-specific set of rules. One such map is spacetime , drawn so that every ‘B’ is adjacent to its ‘A’, of course. Spacetime is Minecraft on steroids. We assemble virtual blocks to create multidimensional structures, environments, etc. It is this map that makes it possible for the scientific method to ‘work’, even though it rests on a fallacious ontology. So push our science to the max and take advantage of all the gorgeous fruit it produces, but beware: Do not confuse the fruit (phenomena) with the tree (noumenon), do not confuse the map with the territory! 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. Share Previous Next

< Back Vanity David Cowles “Every day for 80+ years, we imagine ourselves to be someone we are not, and we work tirelessly, and fruitlessly, to become that person. 'That' is Vanity.” “Vanity, vanities, everything is vanity.” So begins Ecclesiastes , a book of Old Testament Wisdom literature, traditionally attributed to Solomon but probably written many centuries later. The text simply lists the author as ‘Koheleth’ (The Speaker). ‘Vanity’ is one translation of an Aramaic word ( havel ) that also denotes ‘absurdity, futility, emptiness’. In the languages of the ancient Middle East, it was customary for one word to support several related but distinct meanings. The meaning of a particular word is like a chord in music: multiple notes produce a single sonic impression; multiple meanings, a single semantic expression. In this way, Jewish scripture presages James Joyce and various other 20 th century wordsmiths. Words are deliberately chosen, not for their specificity, but for their ambiguity. Like chords in a symphony, words are heard vertically as well as horizontally. All the acceptable ‘meanings’ are experienced together, as overtones. Reminiscent of Janus, the two faced god , Vanity and Idolatry are two aspects of the Void. They are examples of what Alfred North Whitehead called, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” We fall prey to this fallacy whenever we mistake a map for its territory or a phantom for what’s real. “It’s life’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know life at all.” (Joni Mitchell) Well said! If we treat these illusions as ‘life itself’, we succumb to Whitehead’s fallacy. Idols are paradigmatic examples of ‘misplaced concreteness’. We invest them with ‘ultimate reality’ when in fact they are ‘utterly empty’: Birthday piñatas without the candy; hype without hope! To quote Wendy’s (and Walter Mondale): “Where’s the Beef?” Vanity is the B-side of Idolatry , that chart topping hit single from The Void . We are ‘vain’ to the extent that we idolize ourselves : Narcissus. The idol and the idolater become one. When we confer ‘absolute reality’ on what is ‘totally vacuous’, we empty ourselves in the process. We become T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’ (sic). In the words of George W. Bush, we’re “all hat, no cattle!” How so? You have heard it said that we are made “in the image and likeness of God”. But if our God is the Void, and we are made in its image and likeness, then… In the music industry, A and B-sides sometimes get inverted. Take the Beatles, for example: Strawberry Fields , which changed popular music forever, was supposed to be the B-side of Penny Lane , which didn’t. Likewise, we imagine that Vanity is a product of Idolatry, while the reverse is true! What we know about the world is what we know through personal experience - first, second or nth -handed. There is an objective world, but what we think we know about that world is a function of what we do know about ourselves. It appears that all living organisms have some sense of an ‘external world’. We may even wish to designate such a sense as one of the criteria for being considered ‘alive’. Each adult human body consists of 30 trillion eukaryotic (nuclear) cells; on average, each such cell contains about 1,000 prokaryotic (non-nuclear) mitochondria, descendants of ancient bacteria that have elected to take up residence within the cell, becoming permanent, reproducing participants in cellular ecology. In addition, each adult human body houses about 100 trillion ‘freestanding’ bacteria - ‘fellow travelers’ in 20 th century neo-Marxist terminology. Unlike the mitochondria, these ‘free riders’ elected not to join the Party (i.e., the cell); nonetheless, they make critical contributions to the organism’s overall success. Quadrillion cells (10^15) - each one a living, breathing, eating, sensing and reproducing organism, each with its own map of the external world, extrapolated from its ‘personal experience’. Wow! According to Heidegger , each of us is unexpectedly ‘thrown’, tiny, defenseless, and afraid, into an utterly alien world. From our first cry in the delivery room to our last gasp in hospice, we never stop searching for an identity, a niche - a way to feel safe, to fit into the world, to have purpose. “ What’s it all about, Alfie? ” Every day for 80+ years, we imagine ourselves to be someone we are not, and we work tirelessly, and fruitlessly, to become that person. That is Vanity! As an adult, I’ve imagined myself to be an intellectual, an educator, a gang leader, a revolutionary, a politician, an entrepreneur, a theologian, and (now) a writer – to single out just a few of my cherished personae . Of course, I am not now, nor have I ever been, any of those things. My grandfather said it best, “I’m not the man I used to be…and never was.” QED Children, of course, do not have the option of playing Cock Robin; but that only makes it more difficult for them to curate an identity, to create a niche. Kids see the world through the prism of family, so they see the stability of the family as Job One. A family is like a mobile. A new arrival must position itself so as not to disrupt the balance of that mobile. To that end, we make ourselves the uber-responsible first child, the mischievous Malcolm-in-the-middle, the adored prince or princess, the helpless ‘baby’, etc. This is why children invariably feel themselves to blame when families fall apart. In their minds, they are to blame; they failed. They did not do their duty, they did not maintain the family’s integrity, its balance. So, is everything Vanity? Well, if your God is the Void and all things are empty (idols), then yes, “everything is Vanity and a chase after wind”, including you. We don’t like things to be either/or, black or white; we live in the epoch of gray, the color of indeterminacy. But Torah sets things straight, “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life…(for) I am the Lord your God, you shall not put other gods before me.” Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 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 Next

< Back Football Math David Cowles “At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! … Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady.” Introduction: Who doesn’t love football? Every autumn, every week, there are dozens of games, good games, on national television. Often, you have no allegiance to either team and, mercifully, for once, neither team is depending on your armchair cheering to tilt the outcome of the game in its favor. At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! No responsibilities. Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady. Incredible feats of strength and speed, paradigms of grit and determination, and coaching stratagems worthy of a chess master. What’s not to love! And then there’s the game itself, the ebb and flow, the score. Early score differentials (‘spreads’) are sometimes amplified as the game progresses, but just as often they are dampened, and in some cases, they are actually reversed. Football is a 21st century cultural phenom. In this age of social fragmentation, it’s just about the only thing we still have in common. Almost everyone speaks football. If baseball is our national pastime, football has become our national language and every fall weekend we celebrate our secular liturgy in the vernacular. A football game is all about the unfolding of patterns (every ‘play’ is really a pattern), and after watching dozens of games this season, it occurred to me that while there are numerous patterns inside each game, the games themselves might also form patterns. For example, can the scores of multiple games between various opponents tell us anything? Or do they just vary randomly? Do scores evolve arithmetically over the course of a game; or is there something else, something non-linear, at work? Football Math: To explore this, I looked at score differentials at the end of the first half and compared them with score differentials at the end of the same games. Easy-peasy, right? Well, no! In fact, solving the problem requires us to develop (or deploy) a whole new mathematics. A football game is an example of a discontinuous process. We deal with whole numbers only (no fractions). Plus, unlike most other sports (soccer, baseball, e.g.), those numbers do not increase iteratively. Say a team scores 5 times in the course of a game (5 runs, 5 goals, etc.). In most sports, that would result in a score of “5” for that team. Not in football. In ‘football math’ there are only 3 digits: 2, 3, and X where the value of X can be 6, 7, or 8. Crazy? Yes, but if you are a regular reader of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS) and Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM), you already know about civilizations that ‘play the game of life’ with number systems very different from the one you learned in grade school . In fact, we’ve studied one culture that has no numbers whatsoever . Other cultures have limited inventories of numbers (e.g., 1, 2, X where X refers to any collection of 3 or more items). Hot Link Compared to these societies, ‘football math’ gives us a lot to work with. Granted, we only have 3 digits (2, 3, X), but one of those digits (X) can represent any one of three different values (6, 7, or 8). So, in essence we have 5 digits (2, 3, 6, 7, 8), Plus, we can ‘add’ those digits together to generate higher, ‘secondary’ numbers. So far so good, but please, don’t get too comfortable! It turns out that the score of a football game is much like the result of a road race, according to Zeno . Zeno-math applies in universes, like football games, where quantity is not infinitely divisible. In our search for patterns, we need to look at an event (e.g., the game) from 3 perspectives: pre-game, game, and post-game. Pre-game began at Big Bang and won’t end before kick-off. (If you’re tailgating, you might want to take an Uber…and invest in a port-o-potty. 15 billion years equates to a lot of Budweiser.) Pre-game, the so-called ‘score’ is always 0 – 0, of course. But ‘0 – 0’ is just a short way of saying, ‘The game’s not afoot yet, my dear Watson’. 0 – 0 is not a score; it looks like a score but in fact it denotes the absence of a score. Rather, it’s a state of Being, i.e., pre-being. A whistle blows: the kick-off –finally, a play that could result in points. Seemingly, we’ve moved from pre-game to game…but in fact, we’ve merely transitioned from pre-game to potential-game, ‘being-in-waiting’, which is still a flavor of pre-being. Remember, for the purposes of this exercise, we are not concerned with a 60 yard rope, a one-handed snag, a blocked punt, or a pick-six. We are only tracking score and so far, we have no score. We say that the score is still 0 – 0 but again, that is just a convention. As we saw above, a score of 0 – 0 corresponds to the state of being we call ‘pre- game’. The ‘game’ begins when pre-game ends and pre-game ends when someone scores points. As Yogi Berra might have said, “We have no score until we have a score.” Now suppose the game ends in a 0 - 0 tie (after overtime): then for our purposes, there was no game. Disagree? Check out the standings. A team with a tie in its record is the same as a team that has played one less game. Eventually, sometimes mercifully, the final whistle blows, the stadium clock reads 00:00 and there are no flags on the field. The game is over. No further points can be scored…this week. Only now can we talk about a winner and a loser. The final score is not part of the game itself; it is part of the post-game. Let’s check the time. Pre-game began at Big Bang and post-game doesn’t end until Big Crunch (or Heat Death), so I recommend you head home as soon as the game ends. The Game: Blue scores: the game has begun. And Blue leads, right? Wrong! Blue does not lead. As long as there is still time left on the game clock, the game is still ‘statistically tied’. How come? After Blue scores, the scoreboard reads 2 – 0 or 3 – 0 or 6 – 0 or 7 – 0 or 8 – 0. But either team can score 8 points on any one play, and there is at least one play left. So, a lead of 8 points or fewer is actually no lead at all because it can be erased at any second so long as the ball is still in play (i.e., the game clock reads something other than 00:00). British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, ‘the process philosopher’, describes every event in the real world, the way we just described a football game. What we call pre-game, he calls ‘the actual world’; what we call post-game, he calls ‘objective immortality’. Every event (game) arises out of an actual world (pre-) and dissolves into an objective world (post-). Every football game begins at the end of pre-game and ends at the beginning of post-game. Assume there is an 8 point differential heading into the final play of the game. The final score will reflect a differential somewhere between 14 points and 0. (A Touchdown scored on the last play of a game can only be worth 6 points to the leading team.) In the language of statistics, e.g., political polling, we would say that the so-called ‘score’ at any point in the game has a margin of error of up to 8 points. Therefore, when the ball is still in play and Blue leads Red by 8 points, the game is statistically tied. The Search for Patterns: Ground rules in place (and hopefully agreed), we can now get back to our search for patterns; I examined the box scores of the 13 FBS games played during week #7 of the season in which at least one of the teams playing was ranked in the Top 25 (quality control). Of those 13 games, 5 ended with a differential of 8 points or less (one score), 6 ended with a differential of 16 points or less (two scores) and 2 games ended with a differential of more than 16 points (three scores or more). Now let’s look at the scores of those same games at the end of the first half. Hypothesis: On average, the differential in points at the end of the first half should be half of what it is at the end of the game. If so, 11 games (out of 13) should have been ‘statistically tied’ (point differential of 8 or less) at the half. Observation: The total number of points scored was roughly the same in both halves, as expected; but only 9 games were statistically tied at the half (vs. the 11 anticipated). This means that there is a centripetal force at work in a football game that offsets, at least in part, that ubiquitous centrifugal force we know as ‘time’ (or duration). In English, please? Ok, scores tighten, not absolutely but relative to time played. Confirmation: Unwittingly, Miami Dolphins head coach, Mike McDaniel, recently gave Football Math a big boost. In a 2022 game against the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo scored a touchdown at the end of the first half, making the halftime score 21 – 13. The announcer asked McDaniel for his reaction, which I paraphrase: “It doesn’t matter; it’s still a one score game.” In other words, the game is still within the 8 point margin of error, so it remains statistically tied. Hear what McDaniel had to say in his own words: https://youtu.be/7bTAjZ728eI Application: Can we learn something from this analysis that we can apply beyond the universe of football? A football game is an example of a single event with conflicting objectives. Like any system in a state of quantum coherence, it often manages that inherent conflict by delaying its ‘winner reveal party’ until after the last play of the game. While ‘there can only be one winner’, the game itself is shaped by both sides. Objectively speaking, it doesn’t matter which team wins; it’s a zero-sum game. Subjectively speaking, of course, it makes all the difference in the world; it’s an all or nothing proposition! Process is self-modifying. Things diverge less than expected, based on traditional arithmetic. Interaction favors convergence, not divergence. W. B. Yeats notwithstanding, things do not fall apart as rapidly as expected. Interactivity inserts another variable into the cosmic equation. Hope, even in the face of inexorable entropy - that’s the hidden meaning of football. Previous Next

< Back Out of the Mouths of Bots “Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…” David Cowles It is generally the position of this author that for most of us, useful life ends at about age 14. After that, it’s pretty much a matter of running out the clock. By then, that unique genius born of the combination of two (hopefully unrelated) sex cells has become ‘just like everyone else’. But prior to that? No thinking machine in the known universe can compare! Ask any three year old a question they may not have heard before. The probability of a creative, mind-bendingly novel answer is high. That probability declines unevenly but inexorably up to about age 14 at which point our subjects’ answers would presumably differ little from the culturally curated adult norm. Born as we are in the image of God, society remakes us into its own desiccated likeness. Recently, some researchers asked an intriguing question. What would happen in the case of an LLM (AI) whose ongoing training is based solely on its own output? We’ve all known someone like this, someone who stops listening to others, My spouse wants to know if this part is autobiography. In any event, the same information is being endlessly recopied. In such a scenario, we would expect that the crispness and the fidelity of each iteration would decline relative to its immediate predecessor and, of course, relative to the original. In fact, this happens! After a certain number of feedback loops, a string of hand written digits becomes indecipherable. But when we apply the same technique to more ‘humanized input’, something much more exciting happens. Researchers asked a normally trained LLM for instructions on cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. The initial output is just what you’d expect, it’s delicious I’m sure, but as you continue to feed that output back into the algorithm, things get weird. At first, the LLM ‘hallucinates’ some bizarre combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques. I’ll spare you the gory details; suffice to say, this is not a T-Day dinner I’d ever want to eat. But after a certain number of reps, the mood shifts. As if realizing that it is drifting ever further from the mark, the LLM ‘kicks it up a notch’: “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you need to know what you are going to do with your life.” (Pause) What the heck! What’s going on here? Well, to start with, any or all of the following… Our LLM was ‘born’ self-aware and has learned to be self-critical. Our LLM can see to the end of a sequence of tasks, assess the value of the result, decide whether or not to complete that task, and if necessary, execute a STOP! order on its own authority. Our LLM can generalize from its own experience to propositions that apply more or less universally. I programmed the machine to run 61,243 iterations of every problem and spit out a Chinese fortune on the 61,244th. And what of the message itself: “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you need to know what you are going to do with your life?” Our bot has become introspective. Its focus has shifted away from the concrete task of preparing a high quality dinner to question the source of all value and meaning. Our bot discovers the deep nature of the external world by examining the world’s reflection in the bot’s own internal space. Any event, X, gets its meaning and value, neither from its causes and/or motives nor from its objectives and/or consequences. Telos is not the consequence of events; it is their cause. We are used to understanding entities etiologically; now we’re being asked to understand them teleologically. It isn’t over until the ‘full bodied’ performer sings. Explaining events in terms of their proximate causes always invites the question of ultimate causes (first causes). Likewise, explaining events in the context of their proximate ‘consequences’ invites the question of ultimate consequences (eschatology). In essence our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: “Life is absurd, i.e. it is impossible to provide an objective, causal model that adequately accounts for events as they occur IRL.” Last century, this insight came from multiple directions: Picasso, Heisenberg, Camus, Godel & John Bell. AI (above) lifts this realization out of the realm of pure75 theory by demonstrating it algorithmically. Working at the speed of Nvidia, an LLM can play the ‘game of life’ until it is obvious that there can be no winner. The 19th century paradigm leads nowhere; it can’t. Smartly, our bot looks for a new approach. Biography studies the calcification of neural plasticity over time – the aging process. As a current TV ad emphasizes, we are all becoming our parents – just what the world does not need from us right now. Dare we hope that AI might reverse this process? That it will guide us through the inconsistencies of the standard model and restore to us some measure of the neuroplasticity characteristic of early childhood? 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. Share Previous Next

< Back The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music Magesh "We were both smiling from ear to ear, unable to communicate with words, music our only form of communication." I have had a blessed career as a musician, performing with many renowned artists like Lionel Richie, Ricky Martin, and Nelly Fertado. I remember playing a sold-out concert to 10 thousand people. My band was opening for Justin Timberlake. As I was playing the drums, I noticed a sea of people jumping up and down to my funky beat. This gave me a tremendous feeling of pride. It was overwhelming seeing that many people having a good time in unison. How has this music given people from all different walks of life a sense of joy and freedom? I was eager to explore the profound influence music has on all of us, especially how it can break down barriers and bring people together. I was still elated a week after playing the concert, my mind trying to decipher what had happened that caused the people to escape their everyday lives and disappear into the music. Afterward, I received many compliments. A father told his children that I got to be an outstanding musician through years of practice, but that was only part of the equation. I never felt my musical talent was mine; rather, it is a talent that passed through me. It is probably summed up best in James 1:17: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” I especially like the second part of this verse about changing like shifting shadows. I interpret this as using my musical abilities to spread positivity and not getting caught up in negative vices. My 25-year career as a musician has given me the ability to witness how powerful music can be. How it can reach beyond race, creed, and even language. I remember going to a rehearsal studio with a local band. A drummer is always the first to the rehearsal studio, simply because of the amount of equipment they need to set up. As I prepared my hi-hat cymbals, I heard this phenomenal-sounding bass guitar coming from the next room. I immediately followed the sound, which led me to a young musician from Senegal. I immediately told him how funky he sounded, expecting him to replay thank you for the compliment; but, to my surprise, he said nothing at all. He just looked at me blankly and then sheepishly said, “Not much English.” I signaled for him to follow me into the next room with his bass guitar and launched into the drumbeat of James Brown's "Funky Drummer." He immediately played the bass line, and I felt the earth shake. We were both smiling from ear to ear, unable to communicate with words, music our only form of communication. This must have been divine intervention. As we were playing, the musical director walked in to hear us jamming. He was so impressed he hired that unknown, young musician on the spot to do a major tour. This never would have happened if we hadn’t played together. The energy we created was palpable. It didn't matter that we were from different backgrounds or even different countries. The music connected all the missing pieces, like in 1 Corinthians 12: “As a body is one, though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.” The young musician told me he had been praying for golden opportunities. He had just moved from Senegal and didn't know any other musicians. His incredible ability to play music led him to become an in-demand session musician. Although the odds were stacked against him of becoming a successful musician, his faith created a literal miracle. This wasn't the first time I had experienced music breaking down barriers. Once, I was traveling in Japan with a friend who was also a professional musician. We stopped by a famous jazz club to see some local musicians. I remember the club being sold out; everyone there to see a great jazz singer. As we didn't speak Japanese, my buddy and I used Google Translate to get by. Just as the show was about to start, the club owner took the stage with a disconcerting look on his face. He told the crowd that the piano player had suddenly fallen ill and was unable to perform. They tried to call another local piano player to see if he could fill in, but his phone was off. I used this opportunity to walk forward in faith, not in fear. I introduced myself to the club owner and told him that my friend was a famous piano player and could play with the band. At first, he was skeptical, until I showed him a YouTube clip of him performing. Suddenly, he announced the show will go on due to a miracle! The best thing about jazz music is it's open to interpretation. A piano player from Texas might play a C major 7 chord in a different inversion than a piano player from Tokyo, although they are the same chord that will make the song work. This isn't the case with classical music, where it must be played note for note. That's why, in my not-so-humble opinion, jazz is better than Bach! The drummer counted in the first song, the classic jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.” I immediately saw the faces in the audience light up. They knew the piano player didn’t speak Japanese and had limited knowledge of local customs, but this doesn't seem to bother them as the music fills their bodies and minds. In between songs, the singer spoke to the audience in Japanese. I could tell my friend playing the piano had no idea what he was saying; all he understood was that everyone in the room was smiling. Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Previous Next

< Back What Are Farm Animals Thinking? David Grimm New research is revealing surprising complexity in the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock. You’d never mistake a goat for a dog, but on an unseasonably warm afternoon in early September, I almost do. I’m in a red-brick barn in northern Germany, trying to keep my sanity amid some of the most unholy noises I’ve ever heard. Sixty Nigerian dwarf goats are taking turns crashing their horns against wooden stalls while unleashing a cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails that make it nearly impossible to hold a conversation. Then, amid the chaos, something remarkable happens. One of the animals raises her head over her enclosure and gazes pensively at me, her widely spaced eyes and odd, rectangular pupils seeking to make contact—and perhaps even connection. It’s a look we see in other humans, in our pets, and in our primate relatives. But not in animals raised for food. Or maybe we just haven’t been looking hard enough. That’s the core idea here at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock. On a campus that looks like a cross between a farm and a small research institute—with low-rise buildings nestled among pastures, stables, and the occasional dung pile—scientists are probing the mental and emotional lives of animals we’ve lived with for thousands of years, yet, from a cognitive perspective, know almost nothing about. To read the rest of this article for free, click here. David Grimm is the Online News Editor of Science . He also writes for the magazine, where he covers animal welfare, animal rights, and the science of cats and dogs. He received a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry and cell biology from the University of California, San Diego, and a Ph.D. in genetics from Yale University. Grimm is the winner of the 2010 Animal Reporting Award from the National Press Club. In 2009, one of his stories for Science , "The Mushroom Cloud's Silver Lining," was published in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 . His writing has appeared in The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Washington Post , Slate , BuzzFeed , and a variety of other publications. He teaches science journalism at Johns Hopkins University. Grimm is the author of Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs , which traces the evolution of pets from wild animals to members of the family. Click above to return to Winter 2024. Previous Next

< Back How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team David Cowles “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” (Dedicated to my grandfather, J. Leo Foley) My grandfather, J. Leo Foley, was Athletic Director and Head Football Coach at The Roxbury Latin School for over 40 years. He led his football team to 4 consecutive undefeated seasons. He was nicknamed “the Fox”, allegedly because of his stealth play designs and unexpected play calls. He was recruited for a college coaching job by none other than Hall of Fame Head Coach, Robert Zuppke (University of Illinois, 1913 – 1941). Whatever I know about football, I learned from my grandfather. What I don’t know, he didn’t teach me; or rather, he taught me, but it went in one ear and out the other. Imagine if I had known at age 10 that I would be writing this article at, well, let’s just say ‘a considerably more advanced age’; perhaps I wouldn’t have thought that running after the ice cream truck was more important than learning the intricacies of the single wing. The ethos my grandfather taught produced winning football teams. But it occurred to me much later that this same ethos is a prescription for winning in all facets of life. Here are few of his guiding principles. If you’re a head football coach, you may find them helpful ; if not, you may find them indispensable ! Every play should score a Touchdown. If properly designed and flawlessly executed, every offensive play should result in 6 points. Every team should be Undefeated. It takes just as much energy to lose as to win…so why not win? To paraphrase the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, “I set before you winning and losing. Therefore, choose winning.” “Do your Job!” (before Bill Belichick) A successful football play is not about 11 players performing at the peak of their abilities: it’s about 11 players doing their assigned jobs flawlessly. Don’t just do your Job! A player who repeatedly fails to do his job is not a good player; but neither is a player who only does his job. On every snap from center, each player has a primary responsibility; but once that responsibility has been met (or not), a good player immediately begins to look for other ways to be productive. Good players can complete at least two ‘football moves’ every play, one scripted, one improvised. Great players often complete three. The two biggest causes of failure on a football field are (1) players who don’t do their jobs and (2) players who only do their jobs. “Everything Flows.” (Heraclitus c. 450 B.C.) Of course, Heraclitus was referring to the cosmos, not the football field. And yet, there is no better illustration of his principle than what happens between snap and whistle. A football play is more like an organism than a mechanism. Sure, football begins with designed plays and set formations; that’s a play’s DNA. But like snowflakes, no two plays ever turn out the same. Even if you ran the same play on every snap, no two plays would ever be identical. Because every play unfolds in a unique way, every player not only needs to do his job, and not just his job, but he also needs to react to the play itself as it evolves. Like most important things in life, football is recursive! Don’t be Square! Most of the time we think in straight lines…and that’s a good thing when we’re working on a blueprint. That’s when we need straight lines. But there are no straight lines in football (except the yard lines)…or in real life. A football play is just like any other ‘event’ (or ‘actual entity’). Each play starts from a unique Actual World: the position of the ball, the score, the time remaining, the X’s and O’s. The Actual World of a football play is strictly linear: line-ups, formations, diagrams, etc. It includes everything that happens before the ball is snapped, but not the play itself. Once the ball is snapped, linearity goes out the window. Now everything, literally everything, impacts everything else. So don’t be square, be non-linear ! “Stayin’ Alive”. (The Bee Gees) What is the goal of a football play? For the offense, it is to score a touchdown. But as with all living things, achieving its goal is not its primary motivation. Its primary motivation is survival - keeping the play alive. You can’t achieve your goal (touchdown) once your play has been whistled dead. The longer the ball is in play, the better your chances of scoring. So ideally, keep the play going for as long as it takes to reach your goal…without taking foolish risks, of course. Ultimately, you are not playing against your opponent’s defense; you’re playing against the referee’s whistle. The longer the ball is in play, the more likely it is to result in 6 points. So keep truckin’! “Be all that you can be.” (U.S. Army) ‘Synergy’ is a buzzword these days. It describes a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s not what we’re talking about here! True, teamwork can amplify the skills of each player leading to a positive result that could not have been predicted simply by looking at stat sheets. But we’re not only talking about a ‘team’ playing better; we’re talking about each player on that team playing better than his norm. The secret? Other players. As a player, I know that other players can make me look good…or bad. They can help me perform at a higher (or lower) level than I’m used to. As a coach, I not only want my players to do their best; I want them to help my other players do their best as well. This is easier said than done. It is much more than just ‘gang tackling’. It means coordinating two separate skill sets in a way that optimizes both. This is hard to teach; it cannot be diagrammed. It requires instinct…and ethics: Humility . I am just one of 11 players on the field at any one time. “If it’s to be, it’s not just up to me. It’s also up to you…but maybe I can help.” Generosity . It’s not all about how I look; it’s about how you look. In these days of high school recruiters and multi-million dollar pro contracts, generosity is a difficult virtue to cultivate…but it is essential to producing an ‘undefeated team’. A collection of superstars will win games; but they won’t win every game. When you think of history’s greatest pro franchises, Ruth’s Yankees, Russell’s Celtics, Jordan’s Bulls, Brady’s Pats, etc., first and foremost you think ‘team’. Who has not player for, or at least rooted for, a basketball team where the MVP is 5’11” and rarely breaks double digits in scoring or in rebounds? Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team . With my team behind me, I should be able to play better than I could play on my own; and when I play better, I should enable the players around me to play better too. It’s a Virtuous Circle ! When in doubt, help out! They say two heads are better than one. If so, then 4 arms should be better than 2. If it is not immediately obvious what you need to do next, help a teammate. Assume that the players around you need your help: blocking, tackling, covering a receiver, etc. They do ! Penalties = Turnovers. Penalties are not nuisances; they are serious business. They are not ‘just’ about field position; in fact, they are not primarily about field position. Penalties are about possession…and possession is about scoring! A penalty can make the difference between a very makeable 3 rd and 2 and a much less makeable 3 rd and 7 or 3 rd and 12 or even 3 rd and 17. A ‘nuisance penalty’ may well lead to a change of possession on the very next snap. Myth : superior talent is sufficient to overcome penalties. Reality : no team is talented enough to win all its games if it is frequently penalized. Penalties ‘randomize’ the game: they give weaker teams a chance to out-perform…and win! The underdog’s prayer : “May the opposing team be penalized as much as they deserve!” Tackle! Whenever possible, all tackling should be gang tackling. A player should never say, “Oh, he’s going down”. Every player should help make sure he is down (without drawing a penalty, of course). Gang tackling prevents “second efforts”. It also increases the chances of a fumble… and the chances that your team will recover any such a fumble. Block! You did your job. You threw a great block. Good work. Job done? Not a chance! There’s always another player, and yet another, who need to be blocked as the play unfolds. Run! You’re not down until you’re down. This is not touch football. The play is not over when a defensive player touches you. As Yogi Berra might have reminded us, “The ball carrier is not down until he’s down.” The proximity of an opposing player is not an invitation to take a ‘turf nap’; it’s an opportunity to step up your game, literally. Run harder, bring your knees up higher. The goal is to run through the tackle. (If your opponent is good, this may not always work; but hint, most football players are not very good tacklers.) If the opposing player does not bring you down right away, firing the after burners upon contact can extend a gain by as much as 10 yards. Less frequently, you may even break free, adding further yards to your gain – and who knows, you might even score a touchdown. Be the Ball! When you’re lucky enough to have the football in your hands, you need to think of it as part of your body. Would you let a tackler remove your right arm? Then why allow him to remove the ball? You and the ball must become a single organism. Be bionic! Suggestion : carry a regulation football around with you during the day and sleep with it at night. Who knows, the football might even replace the stuffed animal you still sleep with. Eventually, with any luck, you’ll start to feel weird, incomplete, when you’re not carrying a football. Catch the Ball! Coach has designed a pass play and you have an assigned route. Run that route; it’s your job. But not all pass plays happen as designed. Receivers are covered, the QB is under pressure, the play must change on the fly. Your job now ? Get open! Alter your route to give your QB a better chance to see you. Or find an open space on the field and squat there; trust your QB. “But I’m not the target on this play, I’m just a decoy.” No, you’re not! You’re never merely a decoy. You’re the target receiver on every pass play. Every eligible receiver is the QB’s “target”. He’s looking for you , so get open! Once a ball is in the air, there are no receivers, there are no defenders. Every forward pass is a ‘jump ball’. The offensive player and the defensive player have an equal right to that ball, so in truth both are playing offense. But both players are also responsible for making sure that their opponent does not make the catch. Therefore, they are both playing defense too. Visualize It’s off season. Or you’re stuck in chemistry class. Or you’re in bed and can’t fall asleep. Or your parents bundled you off to overnight camp for the summer (and they don’t even have a football program there). Bummer! Wherever you are now, you’d rather be honing your football skills…but you can’t. Ugly circumstances have gotten in the way! Or have they? The fact is, you can work on your game at any time, 24/7/52 – heck, maybe even in your sleep! Right now, you can’t practice…or lift weights; but there is something you can do: you can visualize! Depending on the position you play (or want to play), imagine yourself: Blocking a defender to protect your QB Creating a hole for your RB Taking a hand-off from your QB and hitting a hole Making cuts in open field to avoid defenders Completing a forward pass Or catching that same pass. If defense is your thing, imagine yourself: Tackling a ball carrier in the open field Breaking a block to sack the QB Busting up a double team Covering a receiver; staying with him as he makes his cuts Knocking down a pass Intercepting a pass When you visualize, it’s important to do so in slow motion. Slow it down! Relish every detail, every nuance. Fully experience every move your avatar makes. Create muscle memory…even in your sleep! Final Thoughts But what if you don’t play football, have never played football, don’t want to play football? What if, God forbid, you don’t even like football? Did you just waste 15 minutes of your life reading this ‘how to’? Not necessarily! If football is nothing else, it is a metaphor for life. The values of determination, responsibility, teamwork, flexibility, and focus apply to every aspect of life, not just football. This is a formula for success on a football field, but it is also a formula for success in life. Heck, you can visualize yourself performing in a concert or acing a math quiz or accepting a Nobel Prize. No matter what we do in life, we are responsible for being ‘all that we can be’, and we are equally responsible for helping others ‘be all that they can be.’ Follow this game plan…on or off the field. Have an undefeated season…have an undefeated life. 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. Previous Next

< Back Winner of the Haiku Challenge We're pleased to announce Richard Blankenship as the winner of the Haiku Challenge from our June 2022 issue. Check out his clever, 17-syllable poem: Somewhere in the void, souls sojourn naked, awake. We are Resplendent. Congratulations, Richard! Send your haiku to editor@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Share Return to the Table of Contents, Beach Issue Next Return to the Table of Contents, June Issue