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< Back Reading The Bible Backwards David Cowles May 23, 2024 “We struggle for freedom from the prisons others build for us, from the prisons we build for others, and from the prisons we build for ourselves.” We are accustomed to reading books from cover to cover in the order determined by the author/editor(s). Take the Old Testament: Genesis through Malachi . The order makes sense. Creation had to come before Exodus, which had to precede Monarchy, preceding Exile and the erection and destruction of the Second Temple. Of course, this order is not necessarily the order in which the texts themselves were written. Some of the material in Job and Exodus , for example, is much older than anything in Genesis . The modern Bible groups the books of the Old Testament into four categories: Law (Torah), History, Wisdom, and Prophesy. Read this way, the Old Testament tells a perfectly coherent story. Torah : Creation (Genesis), Liberation (Exodus), Theocracy (Leviticus). History : The transition from Theocracy (Leviticus) to Anarchy (Judges) to Monarchy (Samuel) to Tyranny (Kings, Chronicles, et al.) and ultimately to Captivity (Daniel, Ezekiel) in Babylon (6th century BCE) and Repatriation. Wisdom : The Wisdom Writers paint with a broad brush; they are the ‘big picture’ guys. They write at the level of cosmology, ontology, and metaphysics. They condemn all manifestations of secularism: idolatry, materialism, even consumerism. As they do so, they outline an alternative world order. Prophesy : If wisdom is big picture , prophesy is laser focused . Prophets react to the socio-economic conditions and events of their own time. They write at the level of journalism. Recurring peeves: concentration of wealth, abuse of power, lax observance of Torah and ever increasing secularism. Wait! Something’s not quite right about this picture. The Old Testament was edited and assembled in the time of the Prophets. Wisdom, History, and Torah (Creation & Law) should be viewed from that perspective. But we don’t read the Bible that way, do we? We start with Creation and, well, you know the rest. Doing so makes it seem as though history is a chain of semi-logical deductions with today as its ‘theorem du jour ’. In fact, however, we build our past based on empirical inductions beginning with today . Make no mistake: Judeo-Christianity is a revolutionary idea! It was revolutionary when Abraham left UR, when Moses confronted Pharaoh, when Joshua conquered Jericho, and when Canaan lived in relative peace during 250 years of Theocratic Anarchy under the Judges. It was revolutionary when Jesus fought a war on two fronts, confronting the twin authorities of Rome and Jerusalem, and when Paul planted the seeds that undermined the Roman Empire. It is just as revolutionary today and fortunately, since 1776, we’ve learned a bit about revolutions. We have learned, for example, that all revolutions require three things: A searing indictment of things as they are (status quo). A clear vision of things as they could be (utopia). A practical program to get from point A to point B. We find all three in the Old Testament…but not in the ‘right’ order! The Prophets condemned the immorality, corruption and tyranny that had taken over Palestine. But a critique of current injustice, by itself, doesn’t get the job done. It takes three legs to make a tripod. Critique only bites if it is powered by a vision of ‘what might have been and could still be’. That’s the job of the Wisdom Writers. The Prophets and the Wisdom Writers tell the same story but from different perspectives…and we need them both. The Prophets focus on the specific historical and political situation, the Wisdom Writers on the futility of any human endeavor that lacks God as its guiding principle. Hijacking the words of Robert Kennedy, Prophets “see things as they are and ask why?” Wisdom Writers “dream of things that never were and ask why not ?” Which brings us to the third leg of our tripod: Praxis . It’s how we get from A to B. If Prophesy answers the what , and Wisdom answers the why , Praxis offers the how . Praxis has two sides: History and Strategy. What’s been tried and how did that work out for us? What practical steps must we take now to realize our vision (Wisdom)? We need to begin with a practical political platform – like the Party manifestos in the UK…only realer and truer . But for us, this turns out to be the easy part! Long before there were prophets and wise guys, there was already a detailed political program to redeem an alienated world – it’s called Torah: 613 rules of conduct - time tested in the crucible of Sinai, at the great wall of Jericho, and during the time of the Judges - guaranteed by God to promote health, prosperity, justice, and peace. Wait! 613 rules of conduct? What am I, 8? 613 rules, yes; 8 years old, you wish! But don’t fuss, there’s a secret, shh! Lean in and I’ll whisper it to you: “Torah includes its own Cliff’s Notes . You just have to know where to look.” (If only Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackery had been as considerate.) The Torah consists of 613 laws (above), 611 of which are specific laws applicable to specific behaviors in specific situations; but the other two are general laws, applicable to all things in all situations, and as it turns out: these two laws perfectly summarize the other 611. Therefore these two general laws, collectively known as the Great Commandment (Mt. 22: 37-40), summarize the other 611 (tactics) and form the core of our revolutionary strategy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Deut. 6: 5) “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19: 18b) To which Jesus adds, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22: 40) We struggle for freedom: freedom from the prisons others build for us (prophesy), freedom from the prisons we build for others (praxis), freedom from the prisons we build for ourselves (wisdom). 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! 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“Who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?” < Back From Socrates to Silicon Valley David Cowles Apr 1, 2025 “Who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?” In April, 2009, during the Obama Honeymoon , when all the nation’s problems seemed to be behind us, an obscure billionaire, Peter Thiel, wrote a little noticed, but revolutionary, article for the Cato Institute. Safe to say, Mr. Thiel is obscure no more! Let’s sample: “I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes , totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual…” Hold on, Death and Taxes! Abolish both ? If I’m not mistaken, the last sane person to promote such an agenda in earnest went by the name of Jesus . “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Bomb shell! From Kindergarten on, American children are taught that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are synonymous. Of course, they’re not! A popular assembly can be just as repressive as any hereditary monarch…more so according to Hegel. Athens c. 400 BC was the paradigm of Western democracy; how did that work out for Socrates? Was France really better off under the National Convention (1792 – 1795) and the Reign of Terror than it was under the Bourbons and the Bonapartes? Remember too that both Germany and Italy were functioning democracies c. 1930. And when democratic institutions resurfaced in Eastern Europe (c. 1990), many countries ‘democratically elected’ freedom-phobic regimes. This scenario is playing out right now in the states of the former GDR. Look at our own history. If the United States were a ‘direct democracy’ (rather than a ‘representative republic’), would slavery have ever been abolished? Civil Rights legislation enacted? Would homosexuality still be a crime? To victims, the tyranny of the majority is just as loathsome as that of a lone dictator. From Pericles to POTUS, democracy has obviously ‘underdelivered’ on its promise. Still, there is a difference between saying that democracy does not guarantee freedom and saying that it is incompatible with freedom. Peter has made quite a leap! But perhaps he was not wrong. Does anybody remember Mikail Gorbachev (1931 – 2022)? He was a democrat who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, when he was forced out of office by a demagogue (Boris Yeltsin). Domestically, Gorbachev attempted to implement two seemingly parallel reforms: Glasnost (openness) introduced government transparency, freedom of speech, and multiparty democracy . Perestroika (restructuring) injected Soviet socialism with elements of Western capitalism and free enterprise. Unexpectedly, the two worked at cross purposes. Russians’ long pent-up desire for prosperity overwhelmed the social appeal of democracy and New Russia ended up with neither. Gorbachev ran again in 1996, his last hurrah, receiving less than 1% of the popular vote and finishing 7th in a field of 10 candidates. Sic semper democraticus ! “As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means… As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college…Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking…” Been there, done that! “The notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ (has become)…an oxymoron…(but) I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms…The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.” Local politics can be engaging. Real issues, real candidates with real policy suggestions, and real voters choosing sides based on what’s best for them, their neighbors, and their community as a whole. I grew up in Boston in the 1950’s and 60’s, when boys were expected to be priests, politicians, or police and ‘citizenship’ consisted of rooting for the Celtics and engaging in local politics. I had my first formal ‘campaign position’ at age 13 though I was informally campaigning from the age of 9; and of course I still root for the Celtics! Politics today, local or national, bears no resemblance to my boyhood experience. As a profession, it no longer attracts ‘the best and the brightest’, and the campaign itself comes down to a ‘beauty contest’ conducted via high cost, high tech media. There is little hope that ‘any government so assembled’ will assiduously protect social and economic freedom (Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness). Thiel goes on to discuss the Internet and Space Exploration. Social media, though isolating in some respects, also allows the creation of new spaces where people can interact, perhaps through avatars, ideally without interference from government. Space is ‘the final frontier’. Just as 16th century explorers and 19th century pioneers led to the establishment of new communities and new forms of community, so space travel. In 50 years, self-sustaining human civilizations will exist on multiple planets and moons in our solar system – more opportunity to experiment with consensual forms of social coordination. Remember, Thiel wrote his essay in 2009. If rewritten today, it would most likely be expanded to include at least two other technologies with the potential to open up depoliticized social spaces: Blockchain and Computing 2.0 (AI and QC). Thiel-ism , if I can call it that, is the belief that the inevitably tyrannical state, democratic or otherwise, will become irrelevant as a consequence of technology. Perhaps it already has. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Karl Marx! As the means of production (technology) evolve and as the proletariat gains access and then control over that technology, the state will become superfluous and wither away. For the first time in human history, “we have the technology” to make this happen. So who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist? Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Death of Socrates. 1787. By Jacques Louis David. Oil on canvas. 51 x 77 1/4 in. (129.5 x 196.2 cm). Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1931. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 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 . Share Previous Next 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! Click here. 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< Back Advertising David Cowles Nov 17, 2022 “Madison Avenue knows us. It knows that our deepest longing is to be ourselves, to be what we are, to lose our absolute freedom in the security of an identity....'Never happening!” Once upon a time, advertising was information – ok, ‘spun information’, but still, information. Is anyone old enough to remember “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is?” And what a relief it was! It soothed many an upset stomach and aching head back in the day (i.e., back when we used to eat and drink). Truth in advertising! Ok, truth packaged in a catchy jingle sung by a loveable cartoon character but ‘truth’ nonetheless. Now, fast-forward to today. Take drugs! (Well, only if they’re legal…and safe, of course.) Today’s ads for drugs (Rx and OTC) barely mention what the drug does (positively), but there’s plenty of attention paid to potential complications and contraindications. Some of my personal favorites: heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, and that old chestnut, death. But my all-time favorite, yes, trumping even death, is “Don’t take this drug if you are allergic to it.” Duh! Anyway, nobody cares. Today, ads are all about who you’ll be if... That’s weird. Won’t I still be me ? No, you won’t! You’re not yourself now; you never were, and a new car or a designer drug isn’t going to change that. You know, and you have always known, that there is a disconnect between who you are and what you are . You felt it when you were 3, and 13, and 33; you’ll still feel it when you’re 66…or 99! Alienation (‘being other than you are’) doesn’t go away; you don’t outgrow it, and there’s nothing you can take for it. At every moment of every day of every year of your life, you are, you have been, and you always will be someone , just not yourself . Life is like an old 8MM home movie: you can see yourself crawling, walking, off to school, getting married, etc., but you can never see ‘you’. You’re not there (it’s cellulose for cryin’ out loud!). In film, as in life, there are always only images of you, never you . We’re taught that we are shape-shifters: there is some mysterious ‘substance’ that defines us and that remains us even as we, like Proteus, assume a million different personae. It is one of the many things we’re taught that are not true. Deep down, you know that you’re unmoored, untethered, that you are an exile, a stranger, an imposter. You are like Shakespeare’s actor who “in his time plays many parts.” Yet, the actor is none of his parts, and none of your parts is you. What about all your parts taken together? Still not you. Don’t waste your time pushing this envelope, the result will always be the same. Being someone (or something) is irremediably different from being you . A persona is not a person! Hang on, it gets better! It is not just that you are unrelated to your personae – you are the negation of those personae. Neti, neti! You are not this, or that. In fact, not being them is who you are ! You are a verb. You negate, therefore you are! Non sum ergo sum. You are ground for the figures of the world, or they are ground for you, but either way, never the twain shall meet. So what? So, everything! Not being who you are is who you are! Are you lonely, anxious, scared? Of course, all the time…you should be. Welcome to existential angst . So, what does any of this have to do with advertising? Today’s ads don’t tell us about a product, about how it works, about how it can benefit us in our lives. Today’s ads are about who we are . They promise that you can become your persona du jour…if only you’ll drive a certain car or take a certain drug. Madison Avenue knows us. It knows that our deepest longing is to be ourselves, to be what we are, to lose our absolute freedom in the security of an identity. Who wouldn’t want to be a doting parent, playing ball in the park with your child, or a beaming child, riding shotgun in your parent’s brand-new pick-up? Never happening! We can never be ourselves in the way Madison Avenue intends. (I may have a family, but I cannot BE spouse, father, etc. There’s always a thin film between myself and my roles.) Today, most ads promise just that – but falsely, because nothing could ever do what they promise, not even when Hell has finally frozen over. We are not who we are and that’s all there is to it, madmen (sic) notwithstanding! 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 Chaos David Cowles May 30, 2023 “Butterflies are beautiful, but they can keep their flapping to themselves, thank you! We already have enough environmental catastrophe to contend with.” Everyone says we live in a chaotic world , but do we? Aunt Gertrude makes the point every time she visits. Mathematicians have coined a phrase for it: The Butterfly Effect, and news organizations have turned it into a livelihood: Man bites Dog . Everyone says so, but do we? Chaos has a bad name. People equate it with Anarchy (the absence of order). They assume that events happen randomly in a chaotic world. Nothing could be further from the truth! ‘Chaotic’ and ‘random’ are antonyms, not synonyms. ( But wait for a surprise twist !) A chaotic universe is causal …to a fault! It’s Laplace on steroids. Causality is so strong that every event literally causes every other event. A perturbation of one becomes the perturbation of all. To be is to be omnipotent, but there is a trade-off: to be is also to be impotent . The more I control Dasein (that it is), the less I control Wassein (what it is). The more we can influence “the shape of things to come” (Ramones), the less power we have to make those things happen. “The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.” (Paul Simon) Have we discovered a new Uncertainty Relation a la Heisenberg…or Heidegger? In a chaotic world, everyone, every ‘thing,’ is a malevolent magician. We point our wands where we will and bring into being what may come. Every event effectively recreates the entire Universe, not ex nihilo but de nuovo . Post hoc ergo propter hoc , the bane of every aspiring logician (can one really aspire to be a logician?) is perfectly valid in a chaotic world. In a chaotic world, a butterfly flapping its wings in Borneo may indeed trigger a tornado in Topeka… and an avalanche in Anchorage or a mudslide in Malibu. Do we live in such a world? Let’s see. First, imagine that we all live on the surface of a sphere. Every event since the Big Bang can be represented as a ‘point’ on that surface. Events are positioned so that proximity reflects relevance. The relative positions of points on the sphere correspond to the causal strength of each event vis-à-vis every other event. Causal influences travel along great circles , but their impact is mitigated by the Inverse Square Law (ISL) and mediated by the events they encounter along the way. Here and now and then and there are defined by these mediated relations, woven into a fabric that we call ‘the real world.’ I could live here! Now imagine instead that every point on that sphere has a direct, unmediated connection to every other point. We just transformed our smooth spherical surface into a pock-marked cacophony of chords. Causal influences no longer ‘travel’ (they are instantaneous) and ISL no longer applies. In such a world, anything that can happen may happen; we have zero ability to predict events… or influence them. Here’s the twist I told you about earlier : a chaotic world like this behaves exactly the same way a random world would behave , even though ‘chaotic’ and ‘random’ are antonyms! I could not live here! In a chaotic world, there is no such thing as ‘intentional agency;’ therefore, ‘values’ are irrelevant, aka non-existent. Likewise, such a world has no room for God, either as the creator of heaven and earth or as the fountainhead of all value. The Power is not the Glory! All this suggests a new take on the Garden of Eden story. God created a perfect world, subject to just one limiting condition: non-recursion. The world cannot act upon itself, either by praxis or by gnosis . How could it? It’s already perfect. Any change can only be a step-down. Like isolated Q-bits in a Quantum Computer, if any element of the whole becomes aware of that whole, the wave function collapses and the whole (Eden) is shattered. According to Genesis , Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge because knowledge is inherently recursive. They were free to ‘eat’ though warned not to; but Eve held cheap the riches of Paradise…if they came at the price of ignorance. But Eve held cheap the riches of Paradise…if they came at the price of ignorance. At the first opportunity, she traded immortality for knowledge…and the rest, as they say, is history. No, I mean, it really is ‘history’… not ‘as they say,’ per se ! Adam and Eve “paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” (Joni Mitchell) They traded bliss for gnosis , and so they saw that they were naked! Hallelujah, consciousness! And eternal Eden became the spatio-temporal universe we know and still love - 14 billion years later. Remember the bumper sticker: “If you can read this, thank a teacher?” Well, if you can understand this essay, thank Eve. Later, Job spoke for Eve when he ranked ‘dying without knowledge’ as life’s greatest tragedy (Job 3: 21). (I wonder how many folks today would share Job’s assessment.) Eve and Job risked everything for something we can’t give away today: knowledge! Imagine, we have to force our kids to go to school! East of Eden, it is the project of Homo Sapiens to rebuild Paradise on earth, “to build the City of Dioce” (Pound). God made a perfect world merely by willing it. For millennia, we have been trying to rebuild (Babel?) the world we lost – yup, it was that good – but unlike God, we can’t create things just by willing them. We actually have to build them, and we can only build in a non-chaotic medium like spacetime . So do we live in a chaotic world? Aunt Gertrude notwithstanding, we do not ! Butterflies are beautiful, but they can keep their flapping to themselves, thank you! We already have enough environmental catastrophes to contend with. 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 Cause, Effect, and Global Warming David Cowles Jan 4, 2024 "Every day, we set out in search of an Undiscovered Continent (e.g., India); every night, we end up on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping umbrella cocktails.” A recent article by David Gelles in the New York Times underscores the intellectual bankruptcy of any ethical system based either on the consequences of the act or on the intentions of the actor. (Wow! That doesn’t seem to leave much, does it?) For 50 years, scientists and politicians have been focused on the issue of air quality. Are you old enough to remember those dense clouds of smog that regularly settled over our City of Celluloid Angels (LA)? I know you’re not old enough to remember the great London Fog (1952)! These days are gone, hopefully forever, but they are certainly not forgotten. I’d just as soon not choke to death; how about you? The sharp reduction in air pollution over the last half century represents a great achievement, owing to a happy (did you say, “Unusual?”) convergence of science, technology, and public policy. “But there’s a catch,” according to Gelles. “Some of the particulate matter in all that pollution was actually exerting a cooling effect on the climate by blocking solar radiation… As we clean up the air, we also seem to (be) making global warming a bit worse… “Less pollution is a good thing. Particulate matter — stuff like soot and sulfates, much of which comes from burning fossil fuels but also from forest fires and other sources — contributes to more than 4 million early deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization. “The tiny particles can become lodged in the lungs and even enter the bloodstream, causing problems in the heart and beyond. But as air pollution falls, so too does the concentration of that particulate matter that happened to be deflecting a not-inconsiderable amount of solar radiation… the reduction in particulate matter is also letting more solar radiation in, contributing to global warming.” So I can choose the manner of my own execution. I can roast…or I can choke to death on the ashes! What better example is there of the Law of Unintended Consequences? We have been raised to believe that ‘unintended’ means ‘unusual’. In fact, every action has unintended consequences. Most consequences are, in fact, unintended, even unnoticed. You could make the case that all consequences are unintended, in the sense that nothing ever happens exactly as planned. We should approach the future as Columbus approached the New World: “I know there’s something out there, but I have no idea what.” Every day, we set out in search of an Undiscovered Continent (e.g., India); every night, we end up on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping umbrella cocktails. We cannot say that the result is unrelated to the objective, but they are certainly not identical. Did Columbus set out with the intention of committing genocide and ‘cancelling’ Native American culture? Probably not. He didn’t have to. He simply acted as the person he’d been brought up to be…and that included ugly Eurocentrism, racism, cultural chauvinism, etc. Columbus was just being Christopher , ‘the Christ bearer’. Sidebar: Columbus and Machiavelli were contemporaries – their ends ‘justified’ their means. Postmodernists would say that Columbus was merely a ‘pass-through entity’ – like an S Corp in the US. He did not so much act as the culture and the ethos of his era acted through him. Pity! Things didn’t have to be this way. Columbus was not unaware of divine values like Beauty, Truth, and Justice. He just misapplied them. He allowed his Renaissance ethos to hijack God’s values. He did not allow himself to see the Beauty in Native Americans’ Art, the Truth in their Cosmology, or the Justice in their socio-economic structures. He was pre-programmed to see the world the way he saw it. Please don’t make a fetish of the aboriginal. Europeans have no monopoly on cruelty. Every civilization fails in its core mission: to know, love, and serve God - to instantiate transcendental values in the spatiotemporal world. Everyone in every culture feels the tug of Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Disagree? Ok, imagine a serious political party (other than the Monster Raving Loony Party) with a platform advocating Ugliness, Untruth, and Injustice. How would such goals even translate into specific policy proposals? IRL, the ‘ugly’ would morph into a new aesthetic (Dada?), the ‘false’ would give rise to a new intellectual paradigm (Galileo?), and ‘injustice’ would be recast as revolution (Stalin?). Try as you might, you cannot turn the Satanic, however real, into an ideal. But everyone also feels competing tugs: self-interest, civic duty, family values, moral code, personal security, etc. These secondary tugs are powerful and, for most of us, overwhelming, but for all that, we never stop feeling the tug of the divine. James Joyce brilliantly captures the struggle of well-meaning actors, trying to heed that call in the midst of bigotry, provincialism, addiction, lust, etc. In the process, he tells the story of the whole ‘human race’. In fact, Ulysses telescopes the entire saga into the events of a single day (Bloomsday) in a single city (Dublin). So what’s left? Ethical nihilism? Not necessarily. Put your good intentions back in the drawer, throw your ‘consequential calculations’ in the wastebasket. “Tend your own garden” (Voltaire), “Do the right thing” (Spike Lee), “Just do it” (Nike). Instantiate Beauty, Truth, and Justice everywhere you can, and trust the future to take care of itself (or not – there’s nothing you can do about it anyway). 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.

“It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” < Back Who R U? - The Caterpillar David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” I’m reading an innocuous book about DNA when I suddenly come upon a sentence that snaps my head back: “Many SNP (genetic) variants have no known consequence…but some can be crucial to who you are.” - DNA Demystified by Alan McHughen. If your head did not snap back, don’t worry; few heads would (snap or worry). But for me, this sentence is an epiphany…an epiphany of error! In fact, it would be a challenge to craft a sentence in ordinary English that was more broadly wrong than this one: “SNP variants…can be crucial to who you are.” Try, “The Patriots won every Superbowl ever played.” Wrong – it just seems that way sometimes; but this erroneous sentence is just narrowly wrong , so it doesn’t compete with McHughen’s much broader error. May I belabor the point? Telling someone they are something when they’re not is just plain cruel, even for us neo-Machiavellians. Example: In 2004, misread exit polls indicated a landslide victory for John Kerry (vs. G. W. Bush). I didn’t vote for John Kerry that year, but I have always sympathized with him. Cruel! Back to McHughen: My DNA is no part of who I am. It’s part of my world, the world I live in, but it’s not part of me : a crucial distinction. Let’s fall back on a ridiculously trite metaphor: a game of cards (doesn’t matter what game). The cards are dealt. My crowd is fond of saying, “It’s not a hand, it’s a foot.” Hand or foot, it’s what I was dealt, and it’s what I’m going to have to play. I was hoping for a “grand slam” (bridge or whist). IRL, I was hoping to play for the Boston Celtics. My hand is a jumble of 7’s and 8’s. My height is 5’ 9’’ on tip toes. I probably won’t get my grand slam, and I probably won’t play pro ball. (That doesn't mean I can’t try, but trying is not doing. I am guaranteed the unfettered right to try; I am not guaranteed positive results.) I am not those cards, and I am not this body. These are things I’ve been given to work with. So far so good, but here’s where the metaphor breaks down. In cards, I am the person behind the cards, actively playing them. IRL there is no ‘man behind the curtain’, no ‘ghost in the machine’. Let me explain. Most of the 30 trillion cells that make up my body contain a full ‘copy’ of my DNA (exception: red blood cells), but none of those cells is me. Obviously. But what about all those cells taken together? Are they me? What about the ever-evolving network of cellular interactions? Still not me. So, back to the Caterpillar’s question: “Who R U?” How about we begin with actual experience? After all, at the end of the day, there is nothing else. According to 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, to be is to experience and be experienced; so ‘experience’, let’s start there. So, how do you experience you ? Certainly not as the collection of cells we call a body (or a brain). But it’s not just that I am not a cell, a collection of cells, or even a network of cells. It’s that I am not even like any of these things! It’s not that I am ‘different’ from my cells; whatever I am is entirely unlike those cells. There are no parameters for comparison. A red ball is not a blue box. But we can compare them according to color, shape, utility, etc. No such comparison is possible between me and anything other than me (e.g., my cells). ( Sidebar : Imagine how long it must have taken civilization to convince our ‘best minds’ that the experience we call “I” is just a culture of unicellular organisms in a multidimensional petri dish! How do you do that? How do you make people believe something that silly? Why are we too anxious to think of ourselves as a ‘thing’; is this what Erich Fromm meant by “Escape from Freedom”?) Experience yourself. Take it in. Now nose around. Are you ‘like’ anything you hear, see, taste, smell, or touch? Of course not. You are an entirely unique phenomenon. So am I. In fact, you are not even like me …nor am I like you. Truth to tell, I have no idea what it’s like to be you, or a network of cells; I have no idea what it’s like to be anything at all or even what it’s like to be like something. I am, period. There’s nothing else. I am not even ‘experience’ itself; I experience experiencing. I am not the man behind the curtain: there is no man, there is no curtain, just Oz…and not-Oz. I am not the ghost in a machine: there is no ghost and no machine. It goes even deeper: I am that I am not something other than myself. My parents would be pleased: I am not like those boys who jumped off the bridge. Ok then, so what am I? Nothing? Precisely! Nothing, i.e., no thing. I am not a ‘thing’ and neither are you. Consider the alternative : Suppose I am like something else or, what amounts to the same thing, suppose I am something else. Either way, I am superfluous. The universe doesn’t need two of anything: “Lord, we don’t need another mountain…” The universe does not need carbon copies. To whatever extent I am something else or like something else, I am redundant, and the universe hates redundancy. “Idle hands”, you know… Being is a cosmic censor, relentlessly rooting out waste (e.g., duplication) before it can form. As a result, nothing is duplicative, nothing is superfluous. Again, according to Whitehead, to be is to be both novel and consequential. Mythology recapitulates cosmology. Being is Paradise, the Garden of Eden. (In Hebrew, Eden means ‘place of pleasure’; in Aramaic, it means ‘fruitful’.) But, as we know from Genesis , in Eden ‘one small step’ can turn into ‘one giant leap’ – out of Paradise. How so? A single instance of duplication would create a loop, and a single loop would freeze the universe in an endless and barren cycle of soul-numbing repetition. If anything repeats, then nothing is, was, or will ever be. My new political party will have as its slogan: “No novelty, no being!” Consider Dante’s Divine Comedy . Unwittingly, Dante ambles into the gated community we know as ‘Hell’: Dante’s Inferno , a spiral consisting of 9 descending levels (‘circles’) with the grand prize, Satan, waiting at the inflection point, the nadir of the funnel. Dante walks through Hell, past Satan, into Purgatory and eventually up to Paradise. Now suppose that just one of those infernal ‘circles’, makes no difference which one, doubles back on itself. Dante would be trapped in Hell forever, endlessly repeating the same journey. That’s the price of a single ‘error’. That’s what’s meant by the doctrine of Original Sin . Imagine living in a never-green world, bereft of all novelty, endlessly repeating itself until the ‘crack of doom’. Compared to this, Dante’s Inferno is a trip to Six Flags. One single loop, one single repetition, and all creativity is forever banished from the realm. Fortunately, there are no such loops; the universe makes no such error. We’re some 15 billion years into it and so far, not one error. Imagine you’re married to the same person for 15 billion years and never once have a fight. That’s what we’re dealing with here. The evidence is ‘merely’ inductive, but I am willing to go out on a limb and make a leap of faith (Kierkegaard beware): there will be no such error, ever! How can that be? We appear to be protected from error by some sort of omnipotent and infallible cosmic censor . Everything that is, in so far as it is, is unique. “How do I know? Occam’s Razor tells me so.” The fact that the cosmos has a censor should give us profound hope. It would take so little to make this world a living Hell. Just one error out of googles of transcriptions et voilà , ‘everlasting fire’. The very fact that there has been no such error, and apparently won’t be, can’t be, should encourage us to hope that Hell is empty (except perhaps for the Prince of Darkness) or even non-existent (good news for Lucifer, ‘light bearer’). We are offering a free tour of Hell in this issue of ATM . Sidebar : Non-believers (e.g., Bertrand Russell, Michael Ruse) make a lot of the so-called Problem of Evil. The real problem is a Problem of Good . How do you account for the fact that at the deepest possible level, the Universe is perfect? How’d that happen? Note : This is not a ‘best of all possible worlds’ argument. (Lie quiet Leibniz, I mean that is Gottfried Leibniz, c. 1600 CE) We do not live in the best of all possible worlds – far, far, far from it; but we do live in a perfect (error free) world. Memo to YHWH : There’s no more need for flood or fire. Just allow a single transcription error to slip through and walk away. Ah, but you can’t do that, can you? You tried to with Job , but that did not end well…for you. Thank you for being you! What we call ‘spacetime’ is the physical manifestation of cosmic censorship. The uniqueness of an event’s spacetime location certifies that it is not a duplicate; my coordinates are both my ‘X’ and God’s stamp of authenticity: “Inspected by #1 ”. Many things overlap with me in spacetime, but nothing else occupies the precise region that I occupy. What is co-incident with me, is me! Shift that locus a single nanodegree et voilà , something new. But note, and this is key, it is the uniqueness of events that creates spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique. Topology recapitulates ontology. So, what about this body, those cells, that DNA? None of that is me; but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. These things are part of the world I’ve inherited. My experience of the world is mediated through my genetic makeup, but I am not those genes or that world. It is not enough to say that I (ego) cannot be equated with me (id), that I am-not me. Instead, we need to say I am not-me . It is not just that there is some sort of displacement between myself as I and myself as me. Being I is not-being me . Being I is being not-me! I come to be only by negating (‘being not’) what is. This “I” is very misleading. It implies something ‘other’ than something else. In one respect, “I” is as different from everything else as anything can be; in another respect, it’s no different at all. There is no “I” apart from the world, there is no Wizard directing affairs on Oz. I-ness is embedded in the world, as it’s active negation. Ontologically speaking, ‘not’ is not an adverb or a conjunction, ‘not’ is an active voice, indicative mood verb! ~A ɛ A. ~A is the proverbial snake curled up at the core of being, A. So, “Who R U?” The caterpillar was so 19th century! He asked the quintessential question of his time, the era mislabeled as “The Enlightenment”, i.e., part of the nightmare (history) from which James Joyce says we’re struggling to awake. ‘Who R U’ is a meaningless string of vocables. I am no-who. Who-ness and I-ness are incompatible categories. Backed against a wall by his Christian and Communist critics, Jean-Paul Sartre reluctantly answered the caterpillar’s question: U R ‘Freedom’. ( Existentialism as a Humanism ) U R that you can be whoever or whatever you want to be. Whitehead coined the phrase, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. To understand our genes and our experiences as ‘us’, or even as part of ‘us’, is to succumb to this fallacy. Sidebar : Your DNA and my DNA are 99.9% the same. Yet, my experience of the world is radically different from yours, even adjusting for the fact that we experience objectively different events. Not convinced? Ok, my DNA is 50% the same as a banana’s. (Many people have told me that I am ‘bananas’ but I don’t think they meant that I experience the world the same way a banana does…or maybe that’s exactly what they meant.) We were born after 1750, so we are enlightened (whether we want to be or not); some would even say we’re woke . But woke to what? To the fact that we are star-stuff, that we are cogs in a mechanical universe, that our lives are determined by the forces of physics, sociology, psychology, et al? I am the sum of my gender, my race, my culture, my nationality, my socio-economic class, my upbringing, and the remnants of a host of more or less ‘accidental’ events that constitute my life story – NOT! I am anything but these things! No, I’m serious: anything but! I am the but ! “I am the Walrus.” If I were what the world thinks I am (above), there would be no need for me to be at all. I would be superfluous, and the universe could dispense with me. Occam’s Razor would require it. At most, I could be the nodal point of forces outside my control…or ken. But an intersection of beings is not itself a being. I am, I am nobody’s copy, I am not superfluous. To paraphrase Job, “If the cosmos cancels me, it will be the loser for it.” I am the Walrus (along with all ‘others’, of course); I am the universe’s source of novelty and its wellspring of intensity. “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will.” Image: Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney Productions. 1951 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 Share Previous Next 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! Click here. 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, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Pardon My Language! (An Introduction to Gertrude Stein) David Cowles Mar 29, 2022 For the most part, modern English limits itself to a handful of cases, voices, moods, etc. That would not do for Gertrude Stein. She needed more! If you are a follower of “Thoughts While Shaving”, you know that language is an important focus. Specifically, it is the thesis of “Thoughts” that anyone’s native language enables, but also severely limits, the conception and expression of novel ideas. A language, after all, is just a collection of words and a set of rules for arranging those words to generate meaning. If the vocabulary is too restrictive or the grammar too prescriptive, the truly creative thinker has limited options: Express ideas in other media: painting, music, dance, etc. (assuming the thinker is competent in multiple forms of artistic expression). Express ideas in another language. For example, one could choose a language better suited to carry the thinker’s thoughts. (This assumes there is a language better suited to the thinker’s thoughts, that the thinker can identify that language, and become so proficient in that language that verbal thoughts occur primarily in that language). Dumb down one’s ideas to conform to the limitations of one’s native (or adopted) language. Stretch language so that it is better able to convey the subtleties of thought. Options 1 and 2 are perfectly viable, but realistically, they are only practical for about 1% of the thinking universe. Unfortunately, option 3 is the easiest and, therefore, the default choice for most writers. Most…but not all! A handful of important and prolific writers are capable of transforming their native language so that it can better carry their ideas. In English, we’re primarily talking about Chaucer, Shakespeare, maybe Milton, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Most readers are likely familiar with Chaucer and Shakespeare, at least by reputation, and many will be familiar with Milton and Joyce. But how many readers are equally familiar with Stein? Gertrude Stein had a problem…and she knew it. She wanted to write, but emerging from the 19th century, writing (either in English or in French, her languages) was incapable of carrying her ideas. For example, in writing narrative, it is very important to connect events. How events in a story fit together is often the substance of that story. You can express relationships among events in any language – but you can only express certain types of relationships. For the most part, modern English limits itself to a handful of cases, voices, moods, etc. That would not do for Gertrude Stein. She needed more! She needed to be able to describe reality in hitherto undiscovered cases, voices and moods…and so, she made that happen! Instead of conforming her thoughts to the limitations of 20th century English, she transformed English into a new language with brand new grammatical constructs. With what result? Well, most native English speakers can read Stein with no problem. Even very young children like and understand Stein. In fact, they seem to understand Stein better than we adults do; they have not yet been programmed to shoehorn their thoughts into prescribed formulas. New to Stein? Check out The Making of Americans (her magnum opus) or Everybody’s Autobiography (especially Chapter Four: America) or Ida , but buckle up…and prepare to have your mind blown! Image: Stein in 1935. Credit: Carl Van Vechten Thoughts while Shaving is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please sign up (below) for a direct (RSS) feed. 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 Fundamentals of Cosmology David Cowles Aug 31, 2025 “The major discoveries of the 20th century are forcing us to pry open our minds after almost 2,500 years on lockdown.” An article by Shubhransh Rai, published March 7, 2025 in Quantum Information Review , caught my eye. In it, he posed three fundamental questions: Is spacetime even real? Do the concepts of ‘when’ and ‘where’ even make sense? Is what we call ‘reality’ just a projection of something more fundamental? The way Mr. Rai frames the questions tells us volumes about the biases inherent in Western metaphysics since Plato. We are hung up on the difference between real (Plato’s cave) and imaginary (Plato’s shadows). This distinction is one of the first things we teach our children…after we’ve dispensed with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. On the other hand, Jesus of Nazareth ( aka the Christ) offers a dissenting view: “Unless you become again as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Mt.18: 3) Jesus was on to something big (no kidding)! The ‘under 5 set’ swims freely in an ontologically democratic universe. The adult dichotomies of reality and make believe , dreams and perceptions , are at most poles of a continuum in kids’ minds. We force our kids to internalize our sorting algorithm. They resist…to the best of their limited abilities (they’re under 5 after all). They know a ‘false dichotomy’ when they see one, even if they lack the language proficiency needed to label it as such or the logical tools required to falsify it. Eventually, we sweep up even the most stubborn rug rat into our so-called ‘real world’. Unless they undergo a religious conversion on the road to Detroit, we must resign ourselves to waiting for the next generation of geniuses to be born…and corrupted. Needless to say, the kids we’ve so thoroughly spoiled are now only too eager to corrupt their own offspring, and so the ‘fallacy of reality’ self-perpetuates. Fortunately, the major discoveries of the 20 th century are forcing us to pry open our minds after almost 2500 years on lockdown. I am referring of course to Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Entanglement. Plato, genius though he was, is to the philosophical development of the West what first grade is to the intellectual development of our children: it marks the end of plasticity and the onset of rigidity, the crystallization of ideology, a phase change from fluidity to solidity. We speak of our ‘thoughts crystallizing’ as though it were a good thing, as though it did not rather signal the suspension of thinking per se . A ’crystallized thought’ is like a 1,000,000 year old mosquito fossilized in amber. It is different from the infernal buzzing in my bedroom on hot summer nights. The biases we’ve inherited as adult participants in contemporary Western civilization make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand pre-Socratic (i.e. pre-Platonic) philosophers…and pre-school children. Case in point : Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy (c. 525 – 450 BCE), distinguished between ‘the apparent’ ( doxa ) and ‘the actual’ ( aletheia )…but he regarded both as irreducibly real: “You shall learn…how the things that seem ( doxa ) had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.” He understood something now understood only by quantum mechanics and small children: what we call ‘the world’ is a product of ‘complementarity’. The actual differs from the apparent but only in so far as both together constitute reality . Like so-called ‘Irish twins’, the actual and the apparent continually clash…yet share an unbreakable bond. We build models. We build models that we label ‘real’ and other models that we label ‘imaginary’ but there is only one actual world encompassing multiple levels of epistemology. Not that all models are equal. We can evaluate models heuristically, aesthetically, perhaps even spiritually, but such valuations are not equivalent to ‘real/unreal’ or ‘right/wrong’. Different models do different things for us in different situations. A map can never be its own territory. A model fulfills a purpose; it is reality viewed from the perspective of that purpose. So now the answers to Mr. Rai’s questions seem simple and obvious: Spacetime is real ; what else could it be? But it’s not fundamental. Events are the fundamental quanta of being. What else could be? If there are such things as events, they cannot be other than substructural. Spacetime is real , but ‘real’ only as a relational web that knits myriad events into a single cosmos. Events may, or may not, include distinguishable ‘elements’, but those elements cannot pre-exist the events themselves. Events occur; they are not manufactured…except by the media. ‘Spacetime’ is what happens between events but there is no spacetime within an event. How could there be? An event is a quantum of being; it is irreducible! In 1964, John Bell proved that a single event can span any arbitrarily large cosmic space without sacrificing its identity…like a gerrymandered Congressional district in a swing state. Of course, he was elaborating on something Marcel Proust ‘discovered’ in his Remembrance of Things Past . A single event can span an arbitrary interval of time and space but no , it cannot be used to repeal history or repair an unhappy childhood. So, when and where do make sense, obviously, but only as relational terms. The notion of a location in spacetime is non-sensical in the context of an isolated event: ‘X is on the right’ – right of what? ‘Y came before’ – before what? Spacetime is not prior, historically or logically, to the events that populate it. What we call ‘reality’ (i.e. events in 4 dimensional spacetime) is in fact real (above), but only as a projection of something even more fundamental. Again, the conclusion is obvious. It is only by ‘bad faith’ that we can maintain the view that ‘ what we see is what we get ’. What if I brought you to a library where the entire contents of each book was printed on its cover and where the contents of all the books in the stacks were printed on the exterior walls of the building itself? May I introduce you to my friend, Black Hole? What if I bought you a top for Christmas that spins 720° rather than 360° each time it rotates on its axis? Now you see it, now you don’t, now you do, now you… Meet the ubiquitous electron and the rest of his blinkin’ (fermion) family. What if I told you that an even t happening right in front of you now is just one side of a single event, the other ‘half’ of which is occurring simultaneously many light years distant from us? What if I told you that both ‘sides’ are highly, and simultaneously, correlated and that either ‘side’ of the event could occur (randomly) in either location, i.e. either here…or in a galaxy far, far away? Would you congratulate me on the vividness of my imagination…or would you report me to the ‘proper authorities’, be they parents, teachers, bosses, social workers, doctors…or cops? And yet, this is precisely the world we live in. ‘Child’s play’ under 5; ‘absurd’ thereafter. But the children have the last laugh: “Hey Boomer, your emperor has no clothes.” *** Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) collapses the boundaries between subject, painter, and viewer, just as relativity and quantum mechanics reveal that ‘when’ and ‘where’ only make sense relationally, never in isolation. 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.

The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. < Back Kandinsky: The Painter of Other Worlds David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. All art forms have a fascination with alterity , the idea of the other. Many 20th century painters explored this idea in depth. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944), however, stands out as a painter who devoted his entire career to the exploration of other worlds, and who developed a tool kit and a language to help us continue that exploration. It’s 1910 and a young Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, is starting to paint. Even in his earliest works, Kandinsky explores worlds that differ from the world of ordinary experience. Part dream, part hallucination, part fantasy, Kandinsky’s early works preserve the identity of the subject and the structure of the ground, but he makes the two nearly interchangeable, and he invests the whole with a dynamism, a palette and a perspective unlike anything we would ever call mundane . The name of a 1911 work, Romantic Landscape , sums up this early period. As Kandinsky’s work matured, his landscapes became more abstract, and the relationship of colors and forms became the real subject of his painting. Then in 1913, in Painting with White Border , Kandinsky experimented with a new technique. He situated his imagined world within another, wider world by means of a “white border.” While he is not yet exploring substructural worlds, he is moving conceptually toward the recognition that the world of subject-object, space-time, and sense perception is situated in a much broader cosmos. Later that same year, Kandinsky began to paint canvases without any representational features. Light Picture and Black Lines begin a new era. No longer is Kandinsky abstracting from the world of everyday experience and reformatting that world according to a new logic and a new aesthetic; now he is creating (or unveiling, aletheia ) entirely novel worlds via paint. In 1919, he painted White Oval , a rounded rhombus containing an entire physics of fanciful forms, situated within a dark, vague border that suggests nearly empty space. This world is like a womb, self-contained within the larger body aka ’reality’. Modern cosmologists might recognize this as a bubble universe, an apparently self-contained and finite universe that is really just one “bubble” in a foam of bubbles (all universes, similar or not so similar to our own). During this period, Kandinsky regularly organizes paintings around irregular geometric shapes. For example, Red Oval (1920) depicts what cosmologists might call a brane, a space situated within a higher dimensionality. In Red Oval , all the inhabitants link to the brane (or to something else that links to the brane). Some objects link to the brane at one end point only, others at both end points; does this remind you of today’s strings ? Objects may equally well link to either side of the brane, or they may run through the brane like arrows. All the activity in this world takes place in or just above/below this brane. Compared to the higher dimensional universe in which it is situated, the brane is something like a pancake. Beginning in 1922, Kandinsky’s paintings show the influence of the Bauhaus. However, he incorporates that influence into his own style. In the Black Square (1923), he inserts the architectural forms of Bauhaus into his brane-world. During this period, Kandinsky’s painting becomes increasingly dynamic, and he begins to explore motion as a “thing in itself.” In Yellow Accompaniment and One Center (1924) the subject of the piece is dynamics. The colors, forms, and constructed objects just serve to make otherwise invisible ‘motion’ visible. Remember Zeno’s Paradox , the work of an early Greek philosopher of the same name. Zeno demonstrates that the phenomenon of motion is not possible in any world where the axioms of arithmetic apply. Zeno’s radical conclusion, attacked anew by each generation of mathematicians and logicians, remains unrefuted…2,500 years later. Kandinsky seems to accept both Zeno’s conclusion and the challenge it poses. Kandinsky’s canvasses illustrate the reality of motion, but only in worlds where the axioms of arithmetic do not hold. Using paint, Kandinsky offers us a syllogism: (1) Motion can only be real in a world where the rules of arithmetic do not hold; (2) Motion is real; therefore, (3) the rules of arithmetic do not hold. (I know a bunch of third graders who will be very happy to hear this news!) Accent in Pink (1926), for example, depicts a brane-world, inhabited not by shapes but by bursts, eruptions of color. Kandinsky paints these bursts in cross-sections so that the viewer actually sees the eruptions in process. He anticipated by decades the concept of a ‘block universe’ where time consists of a sequence of slices off the block. Can you say, “Cheese?” Music had a profound influence on Kandinsky, and his works began to take on the quality of musical composition rather than architecture. At the same time, Kandinsky began to explore the semantic nature of artistic forms. In Levels (1929), Kandinsky creates a hieroglyphic language, a kind of Rosetta Stone, and adds a grid to help the “reader” decipher the “text.” Striped (1934) and Delicate Accents (1935) continue this trend, but the apex of this period may be Succession (1935), which presents symbols on a grid reminiscent of musical notation. In the context of other worlds, Kandinsky is here exploring the notion known today as “It from Bit” (Wheeler). Reality is information. It is essentially a code; perceptions are merely clues to that code. But it is with Movement 1 (1935) that Kandinsky's embrace of other-world cosmology ripens fully . This canvas presents a fantastic assemblage of branes, self-contained mini-verses, hieroglyphs and geometric forms of varying dimensionality linked by strange, string-like objects running throughout. From 1935 on, Kandinsky’s works are predominantly characterized by these elements. Until recently, philosophers exploring the idea of ‘other worlds’ were limited by the notion that any viable world must be self-consistent. Beginning with Movement 1 , Kandinsky rejects that assumption. After all, Emerson wrote that “…Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and literally no one has ever accused Kandinsky of having a ‘little mind.’ Moving forward, Dominant Curve (1936) presents a chaotic variety of topologies, somehow co-existing harmoniously on the representational plane of a canvas. It suggests that a multiplicity of inconsistent realities may lie beneath the more routine world we accept as real. Those of us raised on Heisenberg, Godel, Bell, and Feynman will not find any of this the least bit surprising. Might it be that the treasured consistency we claim to find in our world is put there by us? Grouping (1937) continues to explore this theme; it explicitly shows these incongruous regions co-existing and in some strange way, perhaps even using that incongruity to reinforce one another. Could it be the case that meta-reality is the consistent interaction of many worlds, at least some of which lack internal consistency? Capricious Forms (1937) situates a foreground of perpetually moving and morphing organic entities in a static, rectilinear background. Kandinsky is using the elements of his multi-verse to construct a universe that reminds us, at least in some ways, of our familiar world. He may be suggesting that our rectilinear world is emergent from, or a special case of, this sub-structural multiverse. All of which leads naturally to Thirty , another 1937 piece, that suggests 30 unique solutions, some rectilinear, some organic, some musical, some hieroglyphic to the basic problems of ontology. Like M Theory, Thirty suggests that there may be more than one right answer to the riddle of cosmology. Finally, Around the Circle (1940) begins with a somewhat typical assemblage of unexpected ontological entities, all approximately coplanar. But then it adds a window which suggests a sort of “wormhole,” an escape into another far-off multiverse which is itself a collection of varied, yet perhaps subtly different, entities. From Kandinsky’s window, one can see into Carroll’s Looking-glass World. With this work, Kandinsky suggests that dimensional democracy may not only exist within worlds but also between worlds; the process of deconstructing classical reality could turn out to be infinitely regressive. Kandinsky avoids the temptation to offer his own systematic ontology; that is not the job of the artist. The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. This Kandinsky did, brilliantly! At one time, it was in vogue to classify worlds as “real” or “imaginary.” For many centuries, Parmenides' “Way of Seeming” was misunderstood as an illusion compared to his eminently real “Way of Truth.” But that facile way of thinking won’t cut it anymore! Today, we know that we have to take all worlds into account in order to understand the universe. As we continue on this intellectual journey, we would be well advised to return to Kandinsky for inspiration. His paintings provide us with rich and varied models of alterity . Image: Movement I. (1935). Wassily Kandinsky . Public Domain 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. Share Previous Next 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! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall '22 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part II In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So, hang on tight! David Cowles Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part I explored the scientific implications of the Beatles’ iconic 1968 film, Yellow Submarine , a treasure trove of cosmological insights made to order for the 21 st century convergence of Science and Theology. We watched as the Beatles (or their writers) deconstructed our ‘Universe’ into a system of ‘branes’, called ‘seas’: Seas of Time (time), Science (space), Monsters (things), Headlands (thoughts), Holes ( Le Neant ), and the enigmatic Sea of Green. We set out on a voyage that will take us through each brane on our way to a place (or state of mind) called, Pepperland . We didn’t get far! In fact, we only made it through one sea, the Sea of Time…but oh what a ‘time’ we had there! In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So hang on, tight! Note to Readers : In this essay I use ‘Pepperland’ to refer to Pepperland Proper, the last stop on our journey, and ‘ Pepperland ’ to refer to reality in its entirety, i.e., Liverpool, Pepperland Proper, and the Yellow Sub itself. When our journey ends, we will discover that Pepperland, Liverpool and the Yellow Sub are just three different manifestations, three different personae , of one reality. In the end…it’s all Pepperland ! So, next stop: the Sea of Science! If the subject of the Sea of Time was Time (“it’s time for time”), then the subject of the ‘Sea of Science’ should be Science, but it’s not! It’s Space. (Perhaps the editors didn’t like the sound of ‘Sea of Space’.) This sea is characterized by its rectilinear grid and the Platonic solids that populate it. It’s ‘Plato meets Descartes’. Against this background, various waveforms undulate. This sea can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a 2-dimensional surface or a 3-dimensional solid. Figures emerge out of a flat background and enclose a volume, only to undergo further deformations that turn them back into 2-dimensional surfaces. Years after Yellow Submarine , it was discovered during the study of black holes that there is no difference between 2-dimensional surfaces and 3- dimensional spaces. They both encode the same amount of ‘information’. A hologram, for example, is a 3-dimensional image generated from 2- dimensional film. For that purpose at least, the 3rd dimension is superfluous. Now the voyage to Pepperland moves from ‘time and space’ to ‘things and thoughts’; we are entering the Sea of Monsters, followed by the Foothills of the Headlands. The first two branes probe the world as we experience it (spacetime); the remaining branes explore us as the ones who experience that world. The ‘Monstrous Sea’ is populated, well, by monsters. The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore; or if we do, we don’t recognize them. We Liverpudlians have done a pretty good job of purging ‘monsters’ from our immediate vicinity…but only our immediate vicinity. Believe me, monstrosity is alive and well in our world, as the Beatles were only too well aware! The Sea of Monsters is populated by a variety of creatures that exhibit some physical traits similar to ours but others that are very, very different. Most striking is the wide combination of ‘organs’ that ‘Beatle-Biology’ allows. In Liverpool, we are still just experimenting with Bionics. In the Sea of Monsters, most creatures exhibit a combination of organic and mechanical features. D’Arcy Thomas in On Growth and Form found parallels between biological and non-biological patterns. R. Buckminster Fuller did something similar in his two-volume work, Synergistics . Ultimately, technology and biology are not incompatible: if a form works in one realm, there’s no reason it might not work in the other as well. Yellow Submarine is an example of ‘ontological democracy’: it treats organic and mechanical forms as equals. Form is form and that’s an end to it. Organic vs. artificial is a false distinction. Our jealously guarded ‘ontological categories’ are reduced to ‘ontological soup’. One of the creatures in this ‘monstrous sea’ is the ‘dreaded vacuum’. Like a black hole, this creature sucks into itself everything in its environment. “We’ll be sucked into oblivion…or even further,” says Young Fred, the newly appointed admiral aboard HMS Yellow Submarine; and sure enough, they are! The ‘dreaded vacuum’ not only sucks up all objects in its path, including our yellow sub and its crew, but it also sucks up the fabric of spacetime itself. Ultimately, it even sucks itself, tail first, into oblivion: The Beatles’ universe is an ouroboros . The vacuum leaves us with precisely nothing, nothing that is except Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD (JHB). But that’s ok because the Boob is ‘nothing’, quite literally, as expressed in this formula: 1 + (~1) = Boob At the time Yellow Submarine was produced, it was generally believed that black holes annihilated information as well as objects, fields, etc. Years later, Stephen Hawking suggested that information was not destroyed by black holes, but was conserved after all, albeit in a form that renders it useless for any ‘work’. Astoundingly, Yellow Submarine proposed the exact same theory, 6 years earlier. JHB is Hawking radiation! That’s what the Boob is! Information without order. If Stephen Hawking got his ideas from the Beatles, he should have given them proper credit…and maybe he meant to do just that when he famously said, “We stand on the shoulders of giants”. After the vacuum has done its worst, we are left with JHB. Jeremy consists of all the information that existed in the universe prior to its implosion. As Hawking proposed, information is conserved but disorganized in the Boob. Take this snippet of dialog for example: “Do you speak English? “Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure. “But do you speak English? “You know I’m not sure.” But back to our journey. We need to pick-up the pace if we’re to reach Pepperland by nightfall. The first three ‘physical seas’ have been wiped out by the vacuum monster. The ‘physicality’ of Liverpool served us well through the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters but it won’t be much use to us going forward. ‘Physicality’ itself has vanished. What remains? Information (Booby)…and the sub itself. Even though the submarine was sucked up by the vacuum monster, it avoids ‘oblivion’ because, turns out, the sub is the Eternal Present that we’ve been looking for at least since the days of Ponce de Leon. Therefore, the sub can never be erased, annulled, or destroyed. As long as there is anything that is, it is. Next stop: the Foothills of the Headlands. Do people tell you that you “live too much in your own head”? Or do you sometimes wish that you could live life ‘virtually’ rather than physically? Either way, this is the sea for you! Headlands is the domain of pure thought. It takes the form of transparent heads unencumbered by functioning bodies. In the Headlands, thoughts lack orientation, consistency, coherence, purpose, and effect. (Hmm, sounds like we’re ‘inside the Beltway’!) In the Headlands, we see the consequences of an ‘all-in-the-mind’ ontology (e.g. Philosophical Idealism) and believe me, it’s not pretty. Bottom line: “mind matters but mind matter” - another bumper sticker to buy as a souvenir of our trip. After the Headlands…the Sea of Holes! We’ve passed through bodies & ideas, forms & concepts; what’s left? Nothing…but that’s a good thing. In Beatle-World, something and nothing have a complementary and dialectical relationship. Now we are passing into the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of figure and ground is reversed. The sea itself is the ground and the holes in that sea (ground) constitute the figure. Nothingness ( Le Neant ) has now become concrete…so concrete that Ringo is able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket, quite literally. The Sea of Holes is the inflection point in our journey. The ‘figure-ground’ relationship has reversed; for the rest of the voyage, it’s ‘ground-figure’. Something similar happens in Dante’s Divine Comedy . There, the travelers (this time, Dante & Virgil), having reached the lowest rung of Hell (Inferno), witness Satan, encased in ice. Dante begins the ascent of Mount Purgatory, but when he looks back, he is surprised to see that Satan is now hanging ‘upside down’ in his block of ice. The topology of the Sea of Holes is radically non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of directionality, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. In fact, the Sea of Holes is a paradigmatic example of non-orientability. Any system ( Pepperland ) that contains a ‘locally non-orientable’ component (like the Sea of Holes) must be ‘globally non-orientable’ as well. It turns out that the orientable universe familiar to us muggles is just a special configuration within a sea of non-orientability. In a non-orientable universe, there are no privileged vantage points, no privileged directions. In fact, there are no beginnings, middles or ends at all. However, every ‘point’ has two distinct and opposite orientations (like ‘up and down arrows’ on a Mobius strip). “Go for a walk?” Ok, where do you want to go? “Doesn’t matter just head out.” Pretty soon we get to our ‘destination’ but there are a couple of problems: our journey has brought us right back to where we started except that now everything is somehow inverted or reversed. In the Netflix series, Stanger Things , they call this ‘Upside Down World’. “So, what now? Turn around and head back?” No need, just keep walking ahead. Sure enough, we’re soon back ‘home’ and this time everything is back to normal. We are in ‘Right Side Up World’ again…and ready to cross into Pepperland at last…if only we could find it. First, we must pass through one more sea, the Sea of Green; but there’s a catch: out of a seemingly infinite array of holes in the Sea of Holes, only one hole connects the Sea of Holes to the Sea of Green…and on to Pepperland. This is a problem for our Argonauts! As we know from the study of Black Holes, all holes look the same so we can’t examine the holes for clues. How about the surroundings? Any helpful signs there? Nope! Remember, the ‘surroundings’ are ‘nothing’. There is only one possible way out: stochastic trial and error…which has an infinitesimal likelihood of success. Infinitesimal…but not quite zero. Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the one and only hole that functions as a passageway to the Sea of Green, but the Sea of Green is not like the other seas. It’s merely a featureless, ultra-thin membrane separating the other branes from Pepperland. So full speed ahead! Once the Beatles arrive, they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of its permanent residents, “the originals”, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, we later learn that the Beatles are the Sergeant Pepper band! Initially, “the originals” are separated from the rest of the Pepperland by the dome of a “big glass bowl”. It is as if the cosmos were censoring itself. If the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, then both ‘copies’ cannot coexist. The ‘big glass bowl’ maintains the ‘cosmic order’. But that order is about to be shattered! Remember, Ringo has a ‘hole’ in his pocket (from the Sea of Holes). Ringo applies the hole to the side of the “big glass bowl” and through the medium of nothingness the ontological barrier dissolves and the two realities merge onto the same extensive plane. Just as the branes connect Liverpool with Pepperland, so Ringo’s hole (anti-brane?) connects the temporal Beatles with their eternal alter-egos. Is this an illustration of the Christian doctrine known as Resurrection of the Body – the ultimate unification of ‘heaven and earth’? Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Beatles under the aspect of eternity (Parmenides’ Aletheia ) while the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Band under the aspect of history ( Parmenides’ Doxa ). When Ringo’s hole connects the two realms, we learn that the division of Universe into ‘temporal’ and ‘eternal’ rests on a false distinction. Temporality and eternity are complementary aspects of a single phenomenon. So it turns out that Liverpool and Pepperland are really the same place! We never left the Pier after all. Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of Pepperland and Pepperland is the eternal aspect of Liverpool. Nothing that happens in Liverpool stays in Liverpool. Whatever happens in Liverpool happens in Pepperland and vice-versa. In the language of John Bell (Bell’s theorem, 1964), Liverpool and Pepperland are ‘entangled’. In the language of Jesus of Nazareth, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. And what about the sub itself? That also is Pepperland …in its aspect of Presence: Spacetime (Liverpool), Eternity (Sub), and Presence (Pepperland), the 3 faces of reality, Pepperland . If we were writing in the 4 th century CE style of the Nicene Creed , we might say that the Yellow Submarine ‘proceeds from Liverpool and from Pepperland’. The sub (Present) never leaves Liverpool…or Pepperland for that matter. Nevertheless, it continually shuttles between them. In any event, the ontology of Yellow Submarine is overtly ‘Trinitarian’. I hope you enjoyed our two part voyage to reality’s core. I apologize if the music and the graphics are not up to the Beatles’ original. But I hope my marginalia may have made your trip worthwhile. I hope to see you soon on our next all-inclusive cruise. 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. Share Previous Next

< Back Parmenides and Time Crystals David Cowles Feb 9, 2026 “Our earliest model of Being reappears as the latest in a string of recent cosmological breakthroughs that began with Relativity.” 1000 words, 5 minute read On Nature is the oldest work of European philosophy still extant. The verse epic was composed in the 5th century BCE by Parmenides of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, widely regarded as ‘the father of Western philosophy’ and ‘the father of Western science’. Parmenides divides Being into two modes: the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Seeming” ( Doxa ). Most scholars hold that the realm of Aletheia is preeminently real…and Doxa ? Not so much! But Parmenides anticipated such a misinterpretation and took pains to refute it at the outset: “But nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely .” In other words, there is no ‘thing’ without Doxa . Doxa is real, genuine, and universal…as is Aletheia ! Which words did you not understand, Herr Plato (4 th century BCE)? Doctor Popper (20 th century CE)? Nothing spreads quicker or endures longer than interpretive error. For example, we’ve completely misunderstood the 5 th century Book of Job as well. “…What-is (in the mode of Aletheia ) is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of…it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; for it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” Every actual event needs a little Aletheia in its life. It is not enough to say with Heraclitus, “Everything flows!” Whatever ‘flows’ flows relative to what is static. Nor can we define stasis solely in terms of variations in the rate of change. Change is necessarily ‘change from’ and/or ‘change to’. Aletheia is the immobile point from which every actual event must be evaluated; it is the universal measure, ergo the Truth. On the other hand, by applying Bateson’s criterion, ‘a difference that makes a difference’, we see that participation in Aletheia alone cannot constitute an actual event. Aletheia is undifferentiated and inert: imperishable, whole, steadfast, complete, one, continuous. It cannot pass Bateson’s test. Nor can an actual event exist exclusively in the realm of Doxa . As card waving Heraclitians, we like to say that change is the only constant; what we used to call ‘stability’ is just a measure of variations in the rate of change. However attractive to our modern sensibilities, this view makes no sense, empirically or logically. In the realm of Doxa , everything is perpetually coming to be and/or perishing. Therefore, nothing ever really is. There is Past and there is Future but there is no Present; without Aletheia , eternal presence, there is no now . “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color,” – Parmenides describes what it is to exist in the realm of Doxa. An actual event needs Doxa , ‘genuine existence permeating all things completely’, as much as Aletheia – ‘ungenerated and imperishable’. Like sex and marriage before the Summer of Love (1967), Aletheia and Doxa are inseparable. Actual events occupy a space between Aletheia and Doxa and resonate with both. Since Plato, the pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides included, have been ignored by the academy . However, their ideas and models, often without attribution, pop-up, most recently in Kant, Heidegger, Sartre, and Whitehead. In 2025 a team of physicists led by Leo Joon Il Moon discovered a configuration of matter that is reminiscent of the ideas found in On Nature . In a ‘Rondeau Time Crystal’ (RTC), aka ‘Time Rondeau Crystal’, a pattern repeats indefinitely across time . Immediately, you can see that these new entities combine permanence ( Aletheia ) with proliferation ( Doxa ). An RTC consists of three phases which I’ve labeled: Alpha , Delta, and Omega . I propose that we equate RTC’s Alpha phase with Parmenides’ Aletheia and Omega with Doxa . Drawing heavily on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, I understand Alpha to be the set of permanent, objective values that motivate, guide, and judge every actual event. Doxa , then, is the set of eventualities, possible outcomes , all potential matters-of-fact to the extent that they embody, reflect, and are not inconsistent with, Alpha values. The relationship between Alpha and Omega is determined. The realm of Delta , on the other hand, is the home of indetermination: free will, intentionality, agency…plus chaos. Nothing that happens in Delta is caused or even influenced by anything else. Whatever happens is causa sui and sui generis . But there’s more! The topology (shape) of Delta is a function of its position between Alpha and Omega – like a hammock strung between two trees. As a result, conditions in Delta are conducive to the emergence of ‘local’ islands of low entropy, i.e. increased order. That order takes the form of patterned relationships among elements and patterns resonate. Specifically, patterns, actual but transient in Delta , resonate with potential but eternal patterns in Omega . Patterns in Alpha resonate with patterns in Omega , uniting the two. Patterns that emerge indeterminately in Delta may (or may not) resonate with patterns in Alpha and Omega , but whenever patterns resonate, they fuse: one pattern, many manifestations. The Parmenidean-Moon model channels Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Actual events in Delta resonate with potential events in Omega and eternal values in Alpha , resulting in a World that is both concrete and atemporal. Again, Parmenides was out in front: “…She (the goddess) devised Love ( Erota ), first of all the gods…” Erota ↔ Resonance. Our earliest model of Being reappears as the latest in a string of recent cosmological breakthroughs that began with Relativity . What a gift it is to be alive today, curious and conscious! *** Hilma af Klint — The Ten Largest (1907) presents human life as a continuous process of growth, transformation, and renewal, from childhood through old age. Using vibrant color, spirals, and organic forms on monumental canvases, the series visualizes invisible forces—spiritual, emotional, and biological—that shape becoming rather than fixed identity. The paintings suggest endless possibility by treating change not as disruption, but as the fundamental rhythm of existence itself. 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< Back The Big Bang David Cowles Mar 28, 2023 “We imagine Big Bang as though someone switched on a torch in the middle of a dark room; but of course, there is no flashlight, there is no room.” “Daddy, when was the Big Bang?” “About 14 billion years ago.” That was surprisingly easy, wasn’t it? Thank goodness Junior didn’t ask, “Why is the sky blue?” or “Where do babies come from?” Surprisingly easy – or should we say, ‘deceptively easy’? Something just doesn’t feel quite right, does it? So let’s dig a little deeper. (“Sorry, Junior, Daddy can’t play right now; he has to think about the Big Bang.”) We live in time. We count forwards and backwards. We can keep counting back until we get to zero, et voilà , Big Bang. But all this is from the perspective of here and now. What if we look at the same problem from the perspective of the Big Bang itself? That’s going to be a problem. Time originates with Big Bang. Time is a function of Big Bang. Next time Junior asks his fateful question, just say, “Big Bang is not a function of time.” See how easy that was? (Hopefully, Junior has a degree in Mathematics.) It is tempting to think of a universe before Big Bang, a void, chaos, negative vacuum pressure, whatever. We imagine Big Bang as though ‘someone’ (sic) switched on a torch in the middle of a dark room; but of course, there is no flashlight, there is no room. The ‘moment of the Big Bang’ is not a ‘moment’ at all. Big Bang is the origin of moments. Ultimately, it is ‘the set of all moments’; but it is not itself a moment. Those who advocate for a divine role in creation frequently ask, “Why did the Big Bang happen when it did?” The answer’s easy: “It didn’t happen!” In the ‘60s we were fond of saying, “Whatever happens happens.” Like any stopped clock, we were right – this time! All ‘happening’ takes place in time. The set of all ‘happenings’ is time-bound; each ‘happening’ is time-dependent. The Big Bang is not a ‘happening’ so it didn’t ‘happen’! (The ‘60s were good for something, after all.) But that doesn’t make Big Bang any less real. Big Bang doesn’t happen, it just is . Apparently, there is more to being than spatiotemporal happening. Big Bang is real, it ‘exists’; but it exists outside of space and time. The implications of this simple realization are literally ‘astronomical’. The premise of ‘bootstrapping’, the notion that Universe is causa sui , is defeated. Cause is a temporal concept; the idea itself presupposes sequence ( aka time). Universe has no cause. It just is. A cause is necessarily distinct from its effect. But nothing is distinct from Universe; it is, by definition, every thing. This is not a tepid rehash of Aristotle’s failed notion of an infinite universe. Infinite time is still time. We are proposing a Universe that exists outside of time entirely. Note : Initially, I wrote, ‘a Universe whose origin lies outside of time’; that’s wrong! It’s not the origin of Universe that is outside of time; it’s the Universe itself! While the constituents of Universe are time-bound, Universe itself is not. Surprisingly perhaps, this meditation has nothing to do with God or Creation. Those are other matters for other days. All we can say about Universe right now is, “It is! It just is.” We imagine that the primary function of intelligence is to discover what’s true; alternatively, the primary function could be to identify what’s false. We’re talking The Iconoclasm of Everyday Life (lie quiet, Freud) here. Peel away the layers of the onion. Break the first six seals ( Book of Revelation ); only then can you discover what the 7 th seal conceals . A major, if unstated, goal of 20 th Century physics was to develop ontological/cosmological models that do not require the existence (or agency) of ‘God’. Without prejudicing in any way the final answer to the God Question , we can say without qualification that these efforts failed. Every theory of cosmogenesis , to the extent that it masquerades as ontogenesis , is ultimately doomed to fail. Genesis offers a theory of cosmogenesis; it also falls short! It posits a state before fiat lux : “the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” But of course, there can’t be anything before fiat lux . We can allow Genesis some poetic license here, but Roman Catholic doctrine has explicitly glossed this text to emphasize the fact that absolutely nothing existed prior to Creation ( creatio ex nihilo ). “It is! It just is.” Who thought this…before us? Oh yeah, the father of Western philosophy thought it. Parmenides believed this about Being (which he called Aletheia or Truth): “…what-is is not-generated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete, nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous… Thus, coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing, not to be heard of… And what need could have impelled it to grow later or sooner, if it began from nothing?” In a way Parmenides could never possibly have imagined, the detection of CMB in 1964 finally validated his 2500 hundred-year-old hypothesis. Speaking colloquially, it ‘proved the reality of eternity’. Of course, in our era, the concept of ‘eternity’ is fraught. Best think of it as a-temporality, the absence of time. Then we can say without reservation that spacetime is a subset of eternity, a ‘special case’. Eternity is not the sum of all events; it is the precondition of events per se . “No eternity, No time!” Thanks for this, Big Bang! 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