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< Back My Breastplate David Cowles Apr 15, 2023 Christ within me, Christ outside me, Christ before me, Christ beside me. Christ in everything I do, Christ in everything I think, Christ in everything I touch, Christ in everyone I meet, Christ my origin, Christ my destiny, Christ in all things, All things in Christ. 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 Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next Share 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 the Table of Contents, June Issue

“Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” < Back Dante and the Yellow Submarine David Cowles Apr 15, 2024 “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straightway was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense…So bitter is it that death is hardly more.” (Dante, Inferno , Canto I) “Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night… and this is only Thursday morning.” (Ringo Starr, Yellow Submarine ) 650 years after Dante Alighieri completed his Divine Comedy , a rock and roll band from Liverpool retraced his steps. In 1968, they released a modern, ostensibly secular version of Dante’s epic. Yellow Submarine ( YS ) did for the Divine Comedy ( DC ) what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet …but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done! Still, the resonance between these two works is inescapable. Dante lived in the theocratic Middle Ages while the Beatles rose to prominence in the hyper-secular ‘60’s. Apparently, “the fundamental things (do continue to) apply as time goes by” ( Casablanca ). Fittingly, YS opens with a Beatles’ favorite, Eleanor Rigby . It is hard to imagine a song better suited to accompany Dante’s evening in the woods…or Ringo’s morning in Liverpool: “Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear… No one was saved…Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came….” Not exactly Christmas music! But it certainly prepares Dante, Ringo, and us for what’s ahead. As we shall see, Eleanor Rigby describes the World, not only as it is but as it must be…provided it lacks any transcendent dimension (i.e. provided it is wholly self-contained). Dante meets the Roman poet Virgil who offers to be his guide through Hell: “Thou must take another road if thou wouldst escape from this savage place.” ( Inferno , Canto I) Back in Liverpool, Ringo meets his own ‘spirit guide’, Admiral Fred. Virgil takes Dante, not through Tuscany but on a path perpendicular to spacetime itself – a path normally traveled only by the dearly departed. ‘Young’ Fred does the same for Ringo and his pals. We are familiar with the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead , the Jewish Kadish and the Christian Last Rites . These are prayers recited or texts read aloud at the time of a person’s death. The purpose is to facilitate the transition from mortality to eternity. While neither recited nor screened bed side, DC and YS should both be considered part of our multicultural funerary tradition. Both offer detailed images of the stages connecting the angst of Liverpool/Florence with the joy of Pepperland/Paradise. “Abandon all hope, ye that enter here,” reads the sign posted above Hell’s gate. The souls in Hell no longer have the capacity for change. They cannot repent and they cannot influence events in the spatiotemporal world. They are defined now by their sins, and they are compelled to live out those sins eternally. They are expressions of determinism. Dante’s Hell is a spiral; all roads, all rungs, lead to Satan. It is a perverse version of Frost’s Two Roads . As Dante and Virgil descend lower and lower in the narrowing gyre, Hell starts to ‘freeze over’, quite literally. At bottom, they encounter Satan, encased in ice; here is the nadir of all being, a metaphor for Absolute Zero, a foretaste of the cosmic ‘heat death’ that awaits us all. Note : Satan and God share an unusual ontological feature. God is Good per se …but also the Agent of Good in the World. Likewise, Satan is the Agent of Entropy (disorder)…as well as being Disorder itself. This is not to suggest any sort of ontological parity between God and Satan, but that is a topic for another day! This is not the end! Immediately, Dante and Virgil discover that their direction has changed. They are no longer descending; they are starting to ascend Mount Purgatory on the way to Paradise. The first and last verses of Paradiso sum it up: “The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe…the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Back in England (1968), the Beatles are preparing to embark on their own mystical journey. Pepperland has succumbed to an invasion of giants known as “Blue Meanies”. Young Fred, the Beatles’ Virgil, recently appointed Lord Admiral of the Pepperland Fleet , has just escaped in, of course, a yellow sub (what else?). Its idyllic tranquility shattered, its population “bonked” into a zombie-like state of suspended animation, Pepperland land itself is laid waste (as in the Grail legends). The once rainbow-colored countryside is now a monochrome gray. Just as Paradise was lost but later regained (Milton), so Pepperland has been captured and must now be liberated. Ringo, led by the Admiral and accompanied by his three musical pals, proceeds through a gate of his own. The sign atop this gate simply reads “The Pier”…apt, for this is the launch site for the Beatles’ triumphant Free Pepperland campaign. The Pepper Path runs through a series of “seas” (or branes) that challenge every preconception our travelers have regarding the nature of reality. The first three seas deconstruct the phenomenal world into its basic elements: Time, Space, and Stuff (energy manifested as matter and force). Each of these Seas in turn undergoes its own particular deconstruction. First, the Sea of Time. Our time appears to flow one way (from past to future) at a steady rate – so steady that we hardly notice it. Real time flows at a variable rate and it flows backwards as well as forwards. In New England they constantly talk about ‘the weather’; in Olde England, apparently, they constantly talk about ‘the time’. The plodding phenomenal time that we take for granted turns out to be a very particular expression of multifarious noumenal time. Of course, if time is reversible, then whatever exists can be erased, retroactively…all of which leads to what I call, the Nihilist Conjecture : “Anything that can happen does happen; what can be will be and what cannot be won’t be; everything can be erased and all erasure is retroactive; therefore, everything that ever will be erased has already been erased; and nothing that has been erased ever was; therefore, nothing is, and since nothing is, nothing was and nothing can be, since nothing can come from nothing (Parmenides et al.).” This Nihilist Doxology challenges the competing Christian version: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” “To be or not to be” was never the question; the question has always been, paraphrasing the jazz favorite, “Is there is or is there ain’t a world?” Because if there is a world, then the Nihilist Conjecture (‘no world is possible’) has been falsified. So is there a world? The second sea, the Sea of Science, does for space what its predecessor did for time . As with time (clocks), human representations of space (Cartesian grids, Platonic solids) determine what space is. Dimensionality is flexible and not an essential aspect of ‘extension’. The third sea, the Sea of Monsters, deconstructs the material world including the phenomenon of life . It shows that what we consider ‘variety’ in our world is, in fact, a very limited and highly selective subset of all the structures and qualities that spacetime could support…and, according to the Beatles, does support. YS anticipates Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life . In the Sea of Monsters, all possible ‘life’ forms flourish: “Let 1,000 flowers bloom” (Mao). Shape is continuously and indefinitely mutable. All boundaries separating the organic from the mechanical have been dissolved. Platonic forms have replaced by a Chinese menu of customizable combos : “My partner and I would like to order Combo #3 , Combo #7 , and Combo #12 …and we’ll be sharing everything.” What we accept as ‘our prix fixe world’ is the artifact of a limited imagination. This third sea is aptly named. All the creatures are indeed ‘monsters’, not because of how they look or how they are made but because of how they behave (like some children I’ve known – not mine, or yours, of course). Without exception, they are involved in activities that are destructive to themselves and to others. One might question the adaptive advantage of such behavior, but Darwin is not on trial…at least not today. The Beatles’ monsters act exactly like the souls in Dante’s Inferno . Their natures are hard-wired, and they don’t have the capacity to overcome their ‘programming’. They are well outside the ‘state of grace’. Among the various monsters in this sea, one stands out: the Vacuum Monster (VM). As its name suggests, it is the nature of this creature to suck up whatever it encounters. In the “monstrous sea”, creatures threaten other creatures, but the VM threatens everything, first its fellow monsters, then spacetime, and finally, itself alone . The Vacuum Monster is the personification of entropy. In YS , the inexorable process of dematerialization is accelerated. Dante’s Satan, like Evil ( deliver us from… ) in the Lord’s Prayer, is the personification of ‘negation’; and nothing negates like entropy. Sure enough, VM sucks up all the other monsters. Then, seeing that there are no other monsters to suck, it sucks up spacetime, then itself, tail first, like an ouroboros, “into oblivion…or even further”. Like the souls in Hell, the monsters in Yellow Submarine are compelled to act out their destructive personae, even though that activity per se is the source of their desolation. Been there! If any proto-World must self-annihilate, then that World does not exist, never did exist, and never will exist, cannot exist. According to this model, unless anchored to some objective reference point beyond itself, it is inevitable that any possible world would self-annihilate; and if all possible worlds are doomed to annihilation, then no World can possibly exist…ever. Yellow Submarine begins ostensibly as a secular ontology, but it ultimately proves that no consistent secular ontology is possible, other than hardcore Nihilism, which is really an anti-ontology. We are faced with a modern version of Pascal’s Wager . Granted we cannot know for sure whether or not there is a world, we have to put our chips somewhere. At this craps table, the Don’t Come pays Zero; so a Pass Line bet is the only rational option, however distasteful that might be. “I set before you Life and Death, therefore choose (even crappy) Life.” (Deuteronomy 30: 19) Of course, VM does its worst, and predictably we are left with no time, no space, and no stuff. Like Dante before them, our lads have reached the nadir of being, an empty state which the Beatles appropriately call, “Nowhere Land”. This would seem to be the end of our voyage…the end of all voyages in fact…the end of us. But no! It turns out to be just the beginning. As Mary Tudor said, “My end is my beginning.” Nowhere Land may be located at the nadir of Being but, as Dante discovered, your very next step takes you in a different, more positive direction, in his case up Mount Purgatory toward Paradise. But first, it turns out that Nowhere Land isn’t exactly empty after all. It’s not a void. It’s more like the world, as the Book of Genesis describes it, just before creation: "…The earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” Not much of a vacation destination to be sure (I’ve been to worse), but not quite empty either. In ‘nearly empty’ Nowhere Land, there remains an irreducible proto-being by the name of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. The Beatles aptly call him “Nowhere Man”. Dr. Boob (‘JHB’) is quite literally what’s left of a world after its total annihilation. JHB, you see, is pure information – but that information is so disorganized that it cannot know that it knows what it knows …and it cannot be harnessed to do any sort of ‘work’. So it does not pass the ‘Bateson/Whitehead Ontological Test’: it is not a difference that makes a difference. So JHB does not exist in any accepted sense of the word; he’s Being’s ghost. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes have the power to annihilate everything that falls through their event horizons; but he also showed that these same holes radiate that information back into the cosmos. The Boob is that information. He’s all hair, no head . According to the oldest-known Western philosopher, Anaximander, ‘actual being’ comes about only when two or more ‘potential beings’ grant each other “reck”. Unlike the souls in Dante’s Inferno and the creatures in the Monstrous Sea, Anaximander’s proto-beings avoid the allure of mutual self-destruction and decide, independently of one another (that’s essential) to let each other be ( Let it Be – Beatles). They do not do this out of any hope of personal gain or out of any expectation of reciprocity; they do it out of agape , non-thetic, unconditional Love . Here's how Disney would portray the moment of creation: Our hero is a disembodied voice on the edge of the abyss, crying out, “I grant you reck. I know not who you are or even if you are. Would you mean me well or ill? ‘Here’s no great matter’ (Eliot). I grant you reck, unconditionally…come what may, just because it’s the right thing to do.” Being is Value. This is a decision that all of us in the living world make every day. Every time we treat another as we would want to be treated, with no consideration of ‘results’, and no expectation of ‘reciprocity’, we co-create the universe with God. The souls in Hell do not have this opportunity; by their unrepented sins they have forfeited it. Neither do the creatures in Sea of Monsters; they are destined to destroy themselves and everything around them. There is no native Love in Hell, nor in the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters. So, where does totally selfless Love come from? What is its origin? In a universe powered by mutually assured destruction, the decision to let a potential adversary exist, placing your own existence at risk in the process, is utterly unnatural . Therefore, it has to originate outside the ‘natural’, spatiotemporal, material world. The Love that drives the universe cannot originate inside that universe. (It might have done, but that option is ruled out by the Nihilist Conjecture .) Love is a precondition of World; World cannot be a precondition of Love. The source of Love must be transcendent. For Dante, that means Paradise; for the Beatles, Pepperland. Take your pick! JHB does not (actually) exist, but he does have the potential to exist. He is in a coherent quantum state. He needs someone (or something) to grant him reck. Enter the Beatles! They choose to befriend the Nowhere Man: “Mr. Boob, you can come with us if you like…we’ll take you somewhere.” As a member of the crew, JHB finds purpose and, with that purpose, he begins to organize his information so that he can use it to ‘make a difference’…which, ultimately, he does. He exists! He becomes a full-fledged ‘person’ after all…Pinocchio, a ‘real boy’. But note: he does not organize himself; he is dependent on something outside of him: Value manifested as Purpose. The Beatles and the Boob grant each other reck and, as Anaximander predicted, ontogenesis ensues (2500 years later)! But to be born out of mutual reck, out of Love, is not to exist merely in the spatiotemporal, material realm; it is to exist in an eternal realm as well. Being is transcendental. To be is to transcend space, time, and matter/energy. It is our thesis that a cosmos limited to space, time and materiality, i.e., a secular universe, is impossible; it cannot exist. Sidebar : It may not be possible to prove directly that there is and must be a transcendent dimension to the World. But it may be possible, using a reductio ad absurdum , to prove that a Universe without a transcendent dimension cannot exist. In that case, the debate must shift to Descartes’ question: Is there something rather than nothing? Is there anything that can justify my saying with complete confidence, “ Sum ” or better yet, “ Est ”? (According to Descartes, there is: it’s “ Cogito ”.) The Beatles have dealt with Time and Space and Life itself; so what’s next? You guessed it, Mind: the Foothills of the Headlands , the land of disembodied thoughts. Its inhabitants want to help the Beatles on their journey, but they can’t. Like Dante’s souls in Purgatory, these creatures are immaterial and powerless to bring aims to fruition. Sleeping yet. Put on some coffee because here’s where things really get interesting! Our next stop is the legendary Sea of Holes, the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of figure/ground is reversed. The sea itself is now the ground, and the holes in that ground now constitute the figure. Nothing has become concrete, so concrete that Ringo is actually able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket. The topology of this sea is non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of direction, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. But if the Sea of Holes is non-orientable, then the entire universe in which it is embedded, including Liverpool and Pepperland, must also be non-orientable, albeit less obviously so. We may say that the universe is locally orientable but globally non-orientable because it has the Sea of Holes embedded in it. Think of the world we live in: Earth appears flat (locally) but I’m told it’s round (globally). Dante had his experience of non-orientability on the threshold of Purgatory. “I raised my eyes and thought to see Lucifer as I had left him; and I saw his legs held upward.” ( Inferno , Canto XXXIV) Just as Dante and Virgil turn to leave Hell, Dante looks back and is surprised to see Satan upside down, a reversal of orientation that is the trademark of non-orientable spaces. The Sea of Holes leads to Pepperland…but not so fast! You may only enter through an infinitely thin membrane (an event horizon?) called the “Sea of Green”… and only one of the holes in the Sea of Holes connects to the Sea of Green…and there are innumerable holes to choose from. One could easily spend ‘a lifetime’ searching for the one hole that connects to the Sea of Green and on to Pepperland…and never find it. Neither Dante nor the Beatles can reach their goal without the intervention of grace . Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the Sea of Green, and when they do, they immediately find themselves in Pepperland. Remarkably, Pepperland looks a lot like Liverpool, i.e., it’s drab…and lonely. But the Beatles quickly “unbonk” the Lord Mayor with “a snatch of a tune” and “ready the land to rebellion”. It is only now that they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of Pepperland’s permanent residents, the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In fact, the Beatles are the Sergeant Pepper Band! ‘The Beatles’ under the aspect of spacetime, they are ‘Sergeant Pepper’ under the aspect of eternity. Together, the historical Beatles and the eternal Pepper Band use music to restore Pepperland to its former glory. The Battle Hymn of their Republic: All you need is Love! The Blue Meanies are routed. But in the spirit of Love, the Beatles offer reconciliation: “Hello there, blue people. Won’t you join us?” And of course, they do: “Yes, let’s mix, Max!” Pepperland is restored. Welcome to Paradise! And a special thanks to Dante and Ringo for being our ‘spirit guides’ along the way. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Holy Days 2024. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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< Back Colossians David Cowles Jul 30, 2024 “…Any modern day cosmology claiming to be a successful TOE (Theory of Everything) must at a minimum meet the criteria cited by Paul 2000 years ago…” St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. It offers just the conceptual framework we need to understand Universe as a whole: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation , for in him all things were created… God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order) – it would be, wouldn’t it? Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle in fact, as well as order itself ( logos ), the general precondition necessary for the emergence of entities. “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together … Christ is universal and eternal. Christ is the locus, the origin, and the destiny of whatever is (was or will be). Therefore, Christ conditions everything that comes to be. Because all things (events) share a common origin (Christ) and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; but because Christ is also the locus of all events (above), all things hold together in him . “He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order; you can’t be any deader than dead! Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order ; so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enriching contrasts and ultimately into cosmic harmony. Today, academia is engaged in a search of TOE – a Theory of Everything. Needless to say, this search is not taking place in the context of Christian theology. However, it would be well to keep in mind that any modern day cosmology claiming to be a successful TOE must at a minimum meet the criteria cited by Paul 2000 years ago in Colossians : It must account for the diversity of entities (events) amid the solidarity of the Universe and the solidarity of a Universe that consists solely of diverse entities (events). It must explain how and why entities (events) emerge in the first place. It must model entities as unique, holistic events and Universe as a nexus of co-modifying entities. It must explain how things that decay can yet endure. It must allow entities (events) that become and perish in spacetime to be eternal. It must explain how conflict can be resolved into contrast and contrast into harmony. Do you have a pet TOE that meets these criteria? Write it up (under 2,000 words) and we’ll consider it for publication in a future issue of Aletheia Today Magazine . ( Authors will be compensated if published .) Upload your submission here . 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. Keep the conversation going. 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 I Wasn't Anything David Cowles Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? When my world was still magical (ages 6 through 11?), Halloween was the most important day of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas were great fun, and we benefited handsomely from each, but Halloween was our holiday. We got to make our own fun! Plus, it was the only night of the year when we were allowed out after dark, with friends, and, in those days, without any adult supervision. By the time I was eight years old, Halloween season stretched from October 1 through November 2 (All Souls' Day in the Roman Catholic Church and the day the candy ran out in our house). There was no time to spare. The logistics were daunting. Who’s in my wolf pack this year (for Trick-or-Treating)? What streets will we hit and in what order? And, most importantly, what will we be ? Now I am a grandfather 10 times over, and one day I made the mistake (sadly, one of many) of saying to a grandson, “I hear you’re dressing up as Captain America this year.” Crestfallen, he managed, “No Grandpa, I am Captain America.” I had forgotten! Choosing our Halloween ‘character’ (‘avatar’ today) was not a matter of putting on a costume for a few hours or experimenting with an alternate identity for a day. It was more like choosing, or being chosen by, a totem animal. Your Halloween character is ‘who you are’…until the next Halloween rolls around. “Who should I be?” That is the question! “And how should I be it?” Store-bought costumes are sleek and shiny, but they are usually made from some sort of plastic material that makes noise when you walk and has a faint chemical odor. A home-made costume, on the other hand, could be much better…or much worse. It affords more room for novelty, but that is tricky. How ‘novel’ do you want to be at eight years old? Plus, you’ll need Mom’s help, and that means surrendering some creative control. You’re eight; you’re not used to making life or death identity-determining decisions, and this is the most important decision you’ve made in a year; and it will be another year before you have a chance to do it again. There is no margin for error. And yet, I erred. The decision was of such monumental significance that I simply couldn’t pull the trigger; I procrastinated. Sure enough, Halloween morning came, and I was still not settled. Over breakfast, Mom nudged, “Do you know what you’re going to be yet?” And again, after school. Finally, around 4 o’clock I turned to her in desperation, “Mom, what can I be?” “Well, you could be a mummy. I could wrap toilet paper all over you and tape it.” I wasn’t happy, but it was too late to be anything else. “Mummy me up please, Mommy!” It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as you’re imagining. In fact, it was ‘kinda good.’ I hit the streets in high spirits, and everything would have turned out ok, except for one thing: after about an hour, it started to rain, not hard enough to disrupt our mission but enough to soak us to the skin. I’ll let you put two and two together. Suffice to say, I returned home at the end of the evening, a rain-drenched child with wet toilet paper hanging all over him. I couldn’t hold back my tears, “Mommy, I wasn’t anything!” I didn’t get over this disappointment quickly, and it was many years before I appreciated the momentous lesson of these events. The words still ring in my ears today, “I wasn’t anything!” and that realization, that experience ended up forming the cornerstone of my later adult thinking. (Freudians welcome!) “I wasn’t anything!” Of course, I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything on Halloween night; I wasn’t anything six months later, and I’m still not anything today. Neither are you, neither is anyone. The day I become something , is the day I no longer am . But it goes even deeper. What I am is precisely that I am not anything. Neti, neti – not this, not that! For human beings, being is a matter of not being what we’re not. Is this surprising? How could it be otherwise? If I truly was Captain America, then I wouldn’t be me, would I? And if I am me, how can I be anything else? I am neither Captain America, nor a Pirate, nor a Mummy. Neither am I an eight-year-old boy…nor an 80-year-old man! I am what nothing is and what nothing is. So… So…everything! On the one hand, I don’t have to waste time “finding myself” because there is quite literally nothing to find. But that reprieve comes at a great price. I am nothing, but I am nothing in the context of the world. In myself, I can be nothing, but I cannot be nothing in the world. If I were, then I wouldn’t be in the world at all, would I? So, it’s back to Halloween night after all. Because I am nothing, I am free to make myself anything I choose. My identity is not dictated by my genes, by my socioeconomic class (sorry Karl), by my upbringing, or by my education. “I know who I am, and I know that I can be whatever I want to be.” But with such freedom comes an awesome responsibility. I don’t have the luxury of living life on the sidelines. I cannot pass through life as a spectator. I see the world as it is, and I must decide who I wish to be in this world. I might choose to be a recluse, but that, too, is a choice, and being a recluse is still being something vis a vis the world. At eight years of age, there are three sentences that you long to hear:  “Daddy’s bringing home a puppy (or a pony).  “School’s out…forever.”  “Every day is Halloween.” Well, I never got a pony or a dog (strike one), and I did get a college education (strike two), but, good news, every day is Halloween. Home run! Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back Ian Paul Contributor Ian Paul is a theologian, author, speaker, and academic consultant. He serves as Adjunct Professor for Fuller Theological Seminary ; Associate Minister for St Nic's, Nottingham , and Managing Editor for Grove Books . He is member of General Synod, a Mac user, and a chocoholic. He tweets at @psephizo . For a complete list of books he has either written or contributed to, go to https://www.psephizo.com/publications/ . Who Are the Antichrist, the ‘Man of Lawlessness’, and the Beast?

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue The Great Convergence Yesterday, the Very Tomorrow Sometimes the very words we need to hear come from the most unlikely sources. Wisdom isn’t reserved for great philosophers, theologians, or grandparents alone. At the Beginning of the World: Dinosaurs, Genesis, and the Gift of Science The Bible isn’t a science textbook. And we shouldn’t expect it to operate as one. Theology Competing Creeds Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read? The Great Commandment “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. Philosophy Nihilism in Shakespeare (Editor’s note: It’s that time of year when many readers attend ‘summer theater.’ If Shakespeare is on the bill, you may find this essay relevant. Don’t leave home for the theater without reading this first!) Transubstantiation for the Rest of Us For many, though, this term is no help: the technical philosophical explanations are just as head-scratch-inducing as the claim itself. Yet once some of the finer points are made clearer, this explanation can be quite helpful. Culture & The Arts How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team If football is nothing else, it is a metaphor for life. The values of determination, responsibility, teamwork, flexibility, and focus apply to every aspect of life, not just football. This is a formula for success on a football field, but it is also a formula for success in life. Again And at the top of the stairs, we watched it again, the sunset. And that changed everything. Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults The Sultan and the Sea One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. Jesus is Badass At this point, Jesus could probably have saved himself a lot of trouble with a simple, “I’m really, really sorry for what I’ve done, and I promise I won’t ever do it again," but that’s not what happened! Education, Evangelization, & Prayer The People's Creed But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? Teaching Physics in the 21st Century Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine . Haiku Corner Challenges The Sultan and the Sea Challenge Take the Sultan and the Sea Challenge to win $100! Winner of The Haiku Challenge Which 17-syllable poem won our editors over? Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine. Haiku Check out this issue's haiku collection. ATM Renga Cycle 1 What's a renga? Find out and join the fun!

< Back Life is Football David Cowles Feb 6, 2024 ”Super Sunday (2024) is right around the corner! Enjoy the game, but enjoy it mindful that you are witnessing a cosmos unfold before you.” To what extent is Real Life (RL) like American Football? 100% - RL is American Football and vice versa! Football is "basic ontology," intricately choreographed. Football represents process but it also exemplifies that process . In this case, art is not mere representation; it is a monad reflecting every other monad and reflected by every other monad. Football begins with an objective, a Summum Bonum , that transcends the game itself. No, it’s not good sportsmanship - it’s points ! Everything that happens on a football field is motivated by a desire to "score points" (net points)—either by adding points to your team’s score or by denying points to your opponent. The score transcends the game itself. It converts 60 minutes of blood and guts into a sequence of 0’s and 1’s, which is then forever after… the game . In life, Summum Bonum is the Good. In football, the Good manifests as points; in other contexts, it manifests as Beauty, Truth, or Justice. A game of football consists of c. 120 "plays" – that’s it! Everything else (field, clock, refs, fans, etc.) exists merely to support those plays. Every play begins with a plan (diagram), formal or informal, to realize the Good (net points) in a specific context. Example: It’s 4 th and 14; Coach may call for a punt. So, every play has an initial aim (‘score points’) and a plan (‘diagram’) to realize that aim. But no play ever unfolds exactly as designed. Sometimes, the initial aim cannot even be recognized in the final product. Announcer: “I’m not quite sure what they were trying to accomplish there!” And this is a good thing! From the moment the ball is put in play (‘snapped’), every play evolves chaotically. It could not be otherwise. Almost any play, executed exactly as diagrammed, would fail. It would not be able to adapt to all the unexpected developments that occur during play. Every play has 22 primary actors (the players on the field), supported by a large supporting cast. Each primary actor is independent, making his own decisions. Ideally, the players will attempt to execute the play as designed, but when that design falls apart, as it will, we hope that those same players will act creatively to further the play’s overarching goal (net points). A good play is designed to ‘expect the unexpected’ ( Big Brother ). Every play is unrestrictedly recursive; it feeds on itself! As soon as the ball is snapped, things start to go sideways. A player is slow off the mark, misses a block, etc. Now all 22 primary actors, including that sleep-deprived lineman, must modify their rehearsed behavior to take account of the new reality on the ground. And then it’s over. The ref blows the whistle. Absent a penalty flag, the play is ‘in the books’. And now the entire game must adjust to the new reality. Exactly like real life, isn’t it? In fact, it is real life! So, next time a spouse (or other disgruntled loved one) yells, “Football, football, your whole life is football!” Remember that the proper response is “Exactly!” (Danger: Divorce Ahead!) Let’s trace. IRL, all events (‘actual entities’) begin as context-specific applications of universal values (Beauty, Truth, Justice aka the ‘Good’). Driven by those values, as we understand them and as we choose to apply them, ‘something happens’, i.e., an event (an actual entity) occurs. While every event has the Good as its goal, no event gets there directly. Every plan undergoes modification, often massive, before achieving its ‘measure of satisfaction’ (e.g., yards gained before the whistle blows). But once that whistle has blown, the event is objectively immortal. It cannot not now be altered, ever, forever. “It is what it is; deal with it!” And so we do! We cannot change an event once it has been ‘immortalized’ by the referee’s whistle (and a thumbs up from the review booth), but we can still modify its meaning, restrict its relevance, or manage its repercussions. We cannot undo what’s been done, but we can build around it. We can let it take us where we want to go. The QB (or OC) will call another play. The new play will still focus on the game’s Summum Bonum (net points), but it will also react to the outcome of the previous play. That’s football. RL also consists solely of actual entities (‘plays’). Each entity begins as a response, prompted by universal values, to a specific Actual World. From this initial appetition/reaction, the actual entity evolves holistically until it reaches "satisfaction," which in turn becomes its objective immortality. Super Sunday (2024) is right around the corner! Enjoy the game, but enjoy it mindful that you are witnessing a cosmos unfold before you. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back I Led Three Lives David Cowles “Modern physics is right now living at least three lives and possibly a fourth.” In the 1950s there was a popular TV show, I Led Three Lives , about the life of a spy during the early days of the Cold War. I would submit that modern physics is right now living at least three lives and possibly a fourth: an Einsteinian life, a Newtonian life, a Quantum life, and perhaps, a Sub-quantum (Bohm) life as well. Our job, should we choose to accept it, is to find a single principle of explanation that can potentially account for events manifested at all 4 levels, a principle that would allow us to decode the “signatures of all things I am here to read.” (James Joyce) Some proposed ciphers find that all events are determined, either by the Laws of Science (Dawkins) or by the Will of God (Paley), or, popularly but bizarrely, by some ad hoc combination of the two. Other ciphers (Hume) find a randomly seething sea beneath each legible signature. They ascribe emergent structure to chance and coincidence. For almost 3,000 years, Western philosophers have been concerned to explain the relationship between so-called phenomena (signatures) and noumena . Of course, none of these ciphers (above) yields a cogent translation. Philosophy (the ‘linguistics’ of science) is the quest to find the key that will unlock the messages (signatures) and provide us with a coherent translation. Philosophy is the search for the ontological Rosetta Stone. To me, a universe subject to intelligent design, even if a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God is the designer, is doomed to be an impoverished universe indeed. If the 20th century taught us nothing else, it should have taught us that centralized, top-down engineering can never compete with decentralized, bottom-up emergence. Eventually, Blockchain will put Central Banks out of business. On the other hand, I see no reason to believe that our 'cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, and golden temples' ( The Tempest ) can be explained by chance combinations of atoms, subatomic particles, and their forces. “I see no reason,” true enough, but I can do you one better: I have proof! Meet George Jetson, oops, I mean John Bell (1964). He started with a normal assumption: an 'event' is focused on a contiguous but bounded region of spacetime. Then he went to work. When he was done, he had proved that the prevailing concepts of 'event' and 'locality' are inconsistent, that a 'local' model cannot account for the richness of actual phenomena. Bell is the Zeno of our time! Bell proved mathematically that the universe exhibits a level of connectedness inconsistent with mere locality. A universe of events localized in spacetime cannot account for our experience of events. Instead, Bell proposed a model in which the concept of ‘event’ is non-local… and “Bingo!” Both Zeno and Bell produced arguments that were logically unassailable, but no one believed either of them. (Even today, almost no one believes Zeno.) Libraries are full of attempts, unsuccessful in my view, to falsify Zeno. Fortunately, Bell fared a little better. In 1971 Alan Aspect proved Bell's theorem experimentally. It was Bell’s Equivalent of Einstein’s ‘Mercury moment’! But still, folks weren’t convinced. "There must be something wrong." We claim to believe logic, math, and science above all else, but apparently, we don’t. Apparently, we believe what we want to believe, logic and observation notwithstanding: “Zeno and Bell can go to H…” No wonder the world is in the shape it’s in. What is the universe if it is neither random nor engineered? What if it’s a 'floating craps game' played with loaded dice, or more easily, with the payout odds tilted in favor of the player rather than the House? What if the player is the House? The fix is in! The player(s) will one day end up with all the chips. That we know! What we don't know is the outcome of any single bet or dice roll. A series of apparently 'random' events is certain to produce a particular result, but we have no idea how or when. This is a modified version of the ‘emergent order’ model of the universe. It is much closer to Hume than Dawkins, but it differs from both in that it includes an ontological constant (a tilt toward Good and Being) and this all folks call God. 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 Next

< Back The Riddle of Job David Cowles If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “stoppeth one of three." You’ll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who’ll listen. Ask absolutely anyone, and they'll gladly tell you that the Old Testament Book of Job is a treatise on the Problem of Evil ('POE'): Why Bad Things Happen to Good People (Rabbi Harold Kushner, 1981). But is it? Is it possible that everyone (well, nearly everyone) is wrong about Job…and has been wrong for more than 2,500 years? Not very likely, I'll grant you…but possible, yes. Proceed at your own risk, reader! If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who "stoppeth one of three." You'll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who'll listen. No? Still with us? Then let's get started: Simply put, the Problem of Evil (POE) asks why God, presumed to be all good and all-powerful, would allow injustice to infect his creation? It is his creation, after all, correct? Then fix it already! The author/compiler/editor of the Book of Job attacks POE head on, but so do most other philosophers and theologians. Job showcases many potential solutions to POE, but tough questions remain: Are any of the solutions mentioned in Job satisfying? Does the author/compiler/editor of Job endorse any of these answers? Or does he (sic) offer a solution of his own? Or is POE not what the Book of Job is about after all? And if not POE, what? No proposed solution has achieved broad acceptance, and non-believers often cite this as the #1 reason for their disbelief. 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and social activist, Bertrand Russell, based Why I am not a Christian on POE. The Problem of Evil is often viewed through the prism of Job, and rightly so! The Job-poem, which makes up 95% of the Book of Job, is one of the world's great epics. Even in translation its language is dazzling, but more importantly for our purposes, the poem catalogs more 'POE solutions' than any other comparable source. But we have a problem: the poem debunks every one of the solutions it 'proposes,' and it does not seem to offer any new solution of its own. Odd, don't you think? It is customary for philosophical writing to critique prior opinions, but it is also customary for it to propose solutions of its own. The Job-poem does plenty of the former, but none of the latter: 40 chapters and still crickets! From the earliest times, commentators have struggled, unsuccessfully, in my view, to tease a solution to POE out of the Job-text itself. But what if the Job-poet never meant to propose a solution to POE in the first place? What if Job is not about the Problem of Evil at all? What if that's just its 'narrative skin?' In that case, understanding Job as a treatise on POE would be roughly equivalent to understanding Joyce's Ulysses as a Dublin travelog. Job is not about POE; just the opposite. In fact; Job asks questions like: What is the nature and origin of Good? What makes something, anything, 'good,' and what makes one thing better (more good) than another? Is something subjectively good because it is God's will; or is it God's will because it is objectively good? (For more on this, check out The Problem of Good , elsewhere in this issue of AT Magazine.) To this last question, the Book of Job gives a clear and unequivocal answer: God is subject to the same objective ethical values and standards as the rest of us! This is what the book is really all about. Be skeptical, dear reader, but please; hear me out! The Book of Job consists of three parts: an epic poem (the 'Job-poem') that spans more than 40 chapters and makes up 95% of the total text; a short prose Prologue (1:1 – 2:13), and a very short prose Epilogue (42: 7-17). The two prose sections were almost certainly not part of the original text, but were added later. They function as 'bookends,' creating out of whole cloth a possible context for the poem; but in fact they amount to an early (and not very good) commentary on the epic The Job-poem is structured as a dramatic dialog. There are six main characters: Job, four so-called 'friends'… and God! (What would an epic be without God?) Over a very short time, Job, by all accounts a virtuous man, right in his own conduct, just and generous in his dealings with others, has lost his wealth, his children, the respect of his community, and ultimately, his good health. The Job-poem opens with Job sitting on a 'dunghill' covered in boils, lamenting his fate: "Let the day disappear, the day I was born and the night that announced: a man has been conceived. As for that day, let it be darkness…let darkness, dead darkness, expunge it." (3: 3 – 5a) Job asks, "Why couldn't I be a stillborn?" and then goes on to extol the benefits of 'being dead:' "There, no more restless are the troubled…all prisoners are at peace. They hear no more the voice of their oppressor. The small and the great, there are the same; and the slave is set free from his master." (3: 17 – 19) Then, stunningly, Job's understandable self-pity turns into unexpected curiosity: "Why give light…to a man whose path is hidden from God, who screens him off from his sight? (3: 20 – 23) Job can't help himself. As he recounts his sad tale, he stimulates his own sense of wonder. Job's focus shifts from 'why did I have to be born' to 'why does anyone have to be born' to an even bigger question: 'why create a universe at all, if it's going to include so much suffering.' Job's opening speech ends with a further meditation on the human condition, followed by an astounding conclusion: "They (human beings) are quashed before twilight, from daybreak to evening they are crushed; when it is not even nightfall, they forever disappear. Their tent-pin is pulled up on them. They die without knowledge." (4: 19 – 21) Job has just given a detailed description of his plight (and ours) in language worthy of Dante's Inferno . He ends by lamenting the fact that humans 'die without knowledge?' Of all the tortures he's endured, is it possible that the worst is the prospect of 'eternal ignorance?' The Job-poem is structured as a legal proceeding. Job feels that his current sufferings are unjust. He has lived a righteous and generous life; so why is it that so much evil has befallen him? And even if he did inadvertently commit some sins along the way, those sins cannot possibly justify the enormity of his suffering. Job will not feign guilt and throw himself on God's mercy, as his friends suggest. Instead, he decides to bring legal action against the Deity. As we will see shortly, Job's determination does not come out of any disrespect for God, but rather out of profound faith. Job does not imagine that he has the power to divert God's will; and he knows that no court can compel God to appear and make an answer, much less force him to comply with its final judgment. But even with no real hope of prevailing, Job wants to be heard, and he wants to hear from God; and a legal proceeding offers a most conducive venue for such an exchange. Like so many lawsuits today, Job's is not so much about winning as it is about forcing the defendant (God in this case) to divulge some of his trade secrets. And as we will see shortly, in that respect, at least, Job is successful. So, Job asks God for nothing less than a full accounting of himself. What did he have in mind when he 'created the heavens and the earth,' why didn't he do a better job, and why doesn't he fix it now? In this proceeding, Job is the plaintiff, appearing pro se , God the defendant initially in absentia; and the so-called 'friends' are an ancient version of Johnny Cochran's Dream Team…but self-appointed, and much less competent . Pity any god who cannot afford better representation than this! Job bears a heavy legal burden. To defeat God's application for Summary Judgment, Job must show that he has probable cause, that there is a court with jurisdiction, that he has legal standing, and that a potential remedy exists. Job v. God opens with Job offering the court a detailed summary of the injustices done to him. Then, each of the four 'friends' attempts to "justify the ways of God to men" (Milton, Paradise Lost ). They take turns defending God, reprising all the usual POE arguments, but then adding some new ones of their own; these are two of my 'favorites'…not: Job is being punished, not for his own sins, nor for the sins of his father, but for the sins of his sons. Job has been punished (past) because he was eventually going to take God to court (future). Job's friends reason deductively; they accept certain things a priori and they reason from those axioms to the analyses and remedies they offer. That most of their so-called solutions make no sense (e.g., the two above), is of no concern to them; common sense is irrelevant in the face of divine revelation. One by one, Job effortlessly swats away his friends' arguments by appealing to concrete experience. Job is the ultimate empiricist, long before there was any such thing as empiricism. Against the dogmatic deductions of his friends, Job appeals to empirical facts; here's a 'Cliff's Notes' version: I have lived a righteous and just life; yet I am being punished most severely. Others, not as upright as me, often deliberate workers of evil, in fact, are not punished at all. They live lavish lives in good health and pass that wealth onto future generations, intact. I, on the other hand, have no assets, and no children to leave them to, and I live on a dunghill covered with scabs. But Job can read the handwriting on a wall. He realizes that he can't meet a single one of his legal burdens: no one has standing to challenge God, no court has the power to compel God to answer, no one can ever have probable cause to sue God, and even if all these things were otherwise than they are, no plausible remedy exists. So, God-4, Job-0. "There is no joy in Mudville…Mighty Casey (Job) has struck out." Or has he? Job invokes the legal doctrine known as 'Nullification;' he asks the court to look behind the veil of legal procedure and judge the case solely on its merits, i.e., based on universal values and on empirical evidence, without regard to pre-conceived religious dogma. This is a big ask. Job is asking the court to acknowledge Natural Law (as well as written law) as an element in its ruling. Job is also asking the court to rewrite the rules of evidence. What drove Job to challenge God? Had his faith waned? Did his agony finally drive him to blasphemy? Quite the opposite! It is Job's extreme faith that gives him the wisdom and the courage to proceed: "I know that my vindicator lives and that he will rise -p upon the earth…While in the flesh I'll see Eloah…my eyes, not a stranger's, will see." (19: 26-27) Job can challenge God because his faith goes beyond God. Job has faith in a 'higher power,' a power that transcends even God - to wit, 'the Good,' which we experience as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Bottom line: God cannot be unjust and still be God. 'Being just' is not a choice that God makes from moment to moment (as we do), nor can he choose not to be himself; i.e., not to be God. (Jean-Paul Sartre repeatedly asserted that God is the being whose essence precedes his existence. Unlike us, he cannot be other than he is.) Being Justice, per se , he cannot act unjustly! Therefore, Job and a court of competent jurisdiction, can hold God accountable after all. An unjust God is a violation of Natural Law (the Good). So, there is a remedy: the court can simply order (or remind) God to be God! God cannot refuse to be God because God is God. The legal process must grind on. But Job is 'all in.' He decides to go nuclear! Like Truman (Hiroshima) Job has saved his WMD until the very end…and now he decides to unleash it. Job closes by offering an 'Oath of Innocence.' According to the common legal customs of the ancient Middle East (e.g., The Egyptian Book of the Dead ), when one party swears a proper Oath of Innocence, that party is immediately presumed to be innocent. If God still wants to contest Job's claim, he must now appear in person and accept that the burden of proof is now on him. The downside of this strategy for Job? If a party offers an Oath of Innocence that is later shown to be untrue, the 'taker of false oaths' will have earned himself severe additional punishment. Let's listen to some excerpts from Job's oath: "If a poor man would extend me his hand, if in time of disaster he cried out to me (30:24)…If I've ever thwarted a poor man's desires…or ate a loaf by myself, so an orphan could not eat of it (31:16-17a)…If I ever saw a vagabond with nothing to wear or the needy with nothing to cover him (31:19)...If I ever raised my hand to the fatherless (31:21a)…If I ever made gold my reliance and called pure gold 'my security' (31:24)…If I ever looked at the light (starlight) as it shone or the moon as it moved so nobly (i.e. if I ever engaged in pagan worship) (31:26)…If I ever rejoiced at my enemy's ruin and exalted when evil befell him (31:29)…If ever my land has complained of me, if ever it's furrows cried out (31:38)…" Job seals his oath: "Here is my mark, let Shaddai respond! … Complete are the words of Job." (31: 35-40) God's defense team panics, as well as they should. Fearing defeat, they allow a fourth 'friend,' young Elihu, to deliver their closing argument on God's behalf. Perhaps new blood will shake things up…it doesn't! God can 'read a room' as well as the next guy. He sees that his team is losing. Hoping to avoid an adverse judgment, God takes over his own defense. He decides to testify after all; he appears "out of the whirlwind" and takes the stand. Is there a more exciting moment in all of literature? God imagines that he can dispose of Job with a simple display of majesty and might. That usually does the trick where muggles are concerned! But Job is no muggle, far from it, in fact, as God is about to learn, to his dismay. God is supremely confident, over-confident as it turns out, that he can prevail in this Case of the Pesky Plaintiff . He decides to approach the challenge as an American presidential nominee might approach a debate with her opponent. God will begin by questioning Job's 'real world' experience. But first, he calls on Job to put on his big boy pants: "Who is this who obscures good counsel, (using) words without knowledge? Bind up your loins like a man! I will ask you – and you will help me know !" (38: 2-3) Job's God has a keen sense of humor! (So does Job, as it turns out.) God suggests that he is here to learn from Job. In fact, of course, his questions are designed to demean Job, to demonstrate that Job has no business being on the debate stage, much less giving instruction to God: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? (38:4) …Have you ever reached the sources of the Sea and walked on the bottom of the Ocean? Were you ever shown the gates of Death? (38:16-17)" "Have you ever in your days summoned daybreak? Made known to the dawning its place, holding the earth by its corners so the wicked would be shaken from it?" (38:12-13) As sarcastically as possible, God highlights Job's inexperience; then he turns attention to Job's competence. Can Job do the things that God does? Can he do them better? If the answer to both these questions is negative, then what's the point of Job's lawsuit? And what's the remedy? "Who cleaves a downpour's channel and a path for the thunderstorm to rain down on land without people, on wilderness with no human in it, drenching utter wasteland and sprouting grassy growth." (38:25-27) Note that God is concerned for all creation and for all creatures, not just human beings. When God 'created the heavens and the earth,' he created an ecosystem. What happens 'off camera' is just as important as what happens 'center stage.' Is this the first clear reference to 'ecology' in Western literature? Is it the first conscious attack on anthropocentrism? "Do you hunt down prey for the lion and quell the hunger of beasts?" (38: 39) "Can you tie the wild ox by rope to a furrow?... Do you give the horse its bravery…Does the falcon take flight through your wisdom?" (39: 1-7) Chapter 39 offers a litany of animals, each with its own special characteristics and needs – needs that are met by God through the medium of his creation. If Job were to be awarded custody (of the universe), could he do as well? Here God pauses, thinking his work is done. Confident that he has put forward irrefutable arguments, he takes one last swipe at his opponent: "Should Eloah answer (such) an accuser (Job)?" (40:2) Prior to Elihu's rant, Job finished his summation, closing with the words, "Completed are the words of Job." (31:91) Job did not expect to address the court again. Notice that he did not rebut Elihu, but that was before God appeared and testified on his own behalf. In God's opening discourse, he attempts to bully Job into submission (and most commentators think that he does just that). But Job is anything but submissive; he is furious and frustrated. He is not cowed by God's bluster, and he is well aware that God has not answered any of the points in his complaint. Job cannot let God's sarcastic taunts go unanswered; and he cannot back down to a bully. "Lacking respect, how can I answer you? My hand I place over my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not repeat; twice, and I will no more." (40: 4-5) It is easy to see how these words could be read as an 'Act of Contrition.' Job placing his hand over his mouth could be interpreted as a gesture of submission. If this were the actual end of the poem, it would be one of the greatest anti-climaxes in all of literature. This epic is beautifully composed and intricately constructed; it seems unlikely that it would end with such a thud. But how else could the text be read? Could it be that it is God who's disrespecting Job (not the other way around), that Job is the object of the disrespect, not its subject? God's sarcastic tone demonstrates his lack of respect for Job. God sounds like any adult lecturing, and demeaning, a small child. Job's placing his hand over his mouth may be a declaration of victory, rather than a gesture of defeat. Lacking God's respect, what point would there be in Job's talking further. Nor does Job need to speak. He already set out his case in detail during the trial, and God has not addressed, much less rebutted, a single one of his arguments . Therefore, Job's original testimony should be more than enough to secure judgment for the plaintiff. Job will not talk past the close! Is that a quizzical look I see you wearing, dear reader? You're not totally convinced? You're thinking that you might stick with the traditional interpretation after all? Please think again! If the traditional reading were right, the trial would have ended when Job said, "I will speak no more": Game. Set, Match, God! But that's not what happens, is it? Seeing that Job is bloodied but unbowed, God doesn't miss a beat. He launches right into Phase Two of his defense. He no longer expects an outright victory, but he still hopes that an amicable settlement might be possible. The first God/Job exchange boiled down to taunting, bullying and name-calling. (Good thing, nothing like that could ever happen today, right?) But now the time for posturing is past; it's time for God to 'get real!' God has underestimated his opponent – his intellect and his courage - and God knows it! God realizes that he will need to do more if he wants to resolve this matter. He is not going to get away with the parental classic, "Because I said so." God wants to pursue a settlement, but to do so he needs to give Job as much of what Job wants as God can give, safely. God will have to 'open his books.' He will need to share with Job deep secrets regarding the structure and the process of the created world. He must grant Job's request for knowledge! Remember, Job has not asked God to abdicate; he has not asked for reparations or restitution; he has not even asked God to end his suffering. Job is clear, he's only in this for the knowledge! God can no longer get away with talking to Job as if he were a child; he can no longer name call or taunt, and he will not defeat Job by asking him if he has ever summoned daybreak, etc. In his second speech, God treats Job as his equal, and he challenges Job to work with him to rid the world of injustice: "If you've an arm (as strong as) El's…look for the proud and lay him low…crush the wicked where they stand. Cover them all in dust; in dust, wrap their faces! Then I myself will praise you as your right hand brings you triumph." (40: 8-14) This time God challenges Job, not to do something cosmic, something absurd on the face of it, but to do something that is local and conceivable but just very, very difficult. God is happy to join Job in the pursuit of justice; but first he needs to give Job a 'heads-up:' the problem is not as simple as it appears, and the remedy is not as easy as it looks. The balance of God's testimony is given over to Behemoth and Leviathan, two of God's creatures. Traditionally, Behemoth has been identified as 'Hippopotamus' and Leviathan as 'Crocodile' or 'Sea Monster.' God introduces the beasts as a way of explaining to Job the 'ecology' of creation: "Behold now Behemoth which, like you, I created!" (40:15) The creation of Behemoth was not secondary to the creation of Homo Sapiens . The process of creation is the same for both! All creatures are ontologically equal; and Behemoth is a worthy exemplar of creation. And Leviathan? "Can you pull Leviathan (out) with a fishhook? Can you bind his tongue with a rope? ...Will he make a pact with you? Will he be your slave forever? Can you toy with him like a bird? …Who has ever confronted him and survived?" (40:45 – 41:3) "Of all that's under heaven, he is mine. I cannot keep silent about him, the fact of his incomparable valor…Even 'gods' live in fear of his majesty; they're in terror of the ruin he wreaks…He has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he? …Over beasts of all kinds he is king." (41:43-26) So ends God's defense! He will speak no more. Job has twice promised not to speak further…but once again he changes his mind. God had hoped to convince Job that the process of creating and managing a world is much more difficult than Job imagined. Job cannot rid the universe of evil (he is no superhero), but then neither can God! No one can pull Leviathan out with a fishhook; he is part of the ecology of the universe. But even if God could rid the world of Behemoth and Leviathan, he wouldn't do so! These beasts are an integral part of creation; they have unique qualities of their own. True, their behavior may from time to time appear to be 'evil' from the perspective of creatures with conflicting interests, but that's all part of the ecology of creation. Imagine how human behavior would be judged, if judged from the perspective of other species! The Job-poem ends with Job's 'final speech'…and this time it really is final. Job gets the last word…but listen to what he has to say: "Who is this hiding counsel without knowledge? Truly, I've spoken without comprehending – wonders beyond me that I do not know. Hear now and I will speak! I will ask you and you help me know. As a hearing by the ear, I have heard you, and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on 'dust and ashes' (i.e., humanity)." (42: 3-6) Notice that Job's closing lines (38: 1-3) nearly duplicate God's opening, complete with the dripping sarcasm. But now, it is Job who mocks God, not the other way around. We've come full circle and there can no longer be any doubt about the outcome. But before we 'call' the contest for Job, we'd better check to see how the media is spinning it. In a review of 17 independent commentaries on Job, written over the past 150 years, Stephen Vicchio found 15 calling the fight for God and only two calling it for Job. With the publication of this article, I'm staking my claim to be number three; can I put you down for number four? "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." This famous quote is traditionally, but dubiously, attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln or not, it's apparently wrong. A survey of Job commentary reveals that you can fool almost all the people almost all the time. How come? People hear what they expect to hear! We might all just as well have been members of God's discredited defense team. Like Job's 'friends,' we see the world through the lens of our preconceived notions of what's real: "Dewey beats Truman" and "God beats Job." Image: Job by Léon Bonnat (1880) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back The Seven Pillars of Wisdom David Cowles “Kabbalah kept the pre-Socratic tradition alive until it could be born anew in the Age of Aquarius.” According to the ancient Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the Universe is ‘built’ on scaffolding that consists of 10 nodes (‘vertices’) connected by 22 paths (‘edges’). Identifying these nodes using our modern languages is a challenge and not every commentator agrees on how best to translate each term. Here’s one approach: While the terminology can vary slightly between traditions the order of these nodes is invariable…and significant. The first three are predominantly conceptual and sit like a cornice (crown) atop the other, more physical, seven (body). These 10 nodes (called Sefirot ) are interconnected by a network of 22 pathways: 3 horizontal, 7 vertical and 12 diagonal – 3, 7, 12, three numbers with outsized importance in Judeo-Christian culture, theology, and spirituality. Kabbalah maps virtually every aspect of lived experience onto these 10 Sefirot and their 22 connecting pathways (e.g. there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet). Parts of the body, hours of the day, days of the week, months of the year, angels, patriarchs, etc. all map onto Kabbalah’s universal logos . For example, in terms of the human body, Keter is the head (cerebellum), Tiferet the heart, Yesod the procreative organs, and Malkhut the progeny, i.e. our ‘footprints in the sand’. Fully explicating this system is literally the work of a lifetime. In this article, we will focus on the 7 verticals, the so-called Seven Pillars of Wisdom (T. E. Lawrence). These 7 are grouped into 3 ‘columns’ corresponding, roughly, to the feminine (3), the masculine (3), and the divine (4) aspects of reality. The central column links God and the World: Godhead ( Keter ) through Beauty ( Tiferet ) and Foundation ( Yesod ) to Kingdom ( Malkhut )…and back again. Keter represents the purely conceptual aspect of Universe, Malkhut the purely physical. Tiferet (Beauty) and Yesod (Sexuality) refer to the procreative process that unites the two. Unlike Manhattan, Kabbalah has no one-way streets. Influences trickle down from Godhead, through Beauty and Foundation, into the World just as they bubble up from the World to Godhead. Remember the days when coffee ‘percolated’? Water at the base of the pot turned to steam at the top which trickled down through the grounds and left a delicious liquid residue on the bottom. The Tree of Life is modeled on a similar concept of process. On the right side are the ‘masculine’ Sefirot : Wisdom ( Chokmah ), Love ( Chesed ), and Victory ( Netzach ); on the left side, the ‘feminine’: Understanding ( Binah ), Strength ( Gevurah ), and Splendor ( Hod ). Such gender based characterizations may offend our contemporary sensibilities, but it is important to understand this terminology in the context of the ancient and medieval sociologies from which it rose. It is also essential to understand that Kabbalah means neither of these gender designations literally. Gender is just one of the parameters it uses in building its map. We wouldn’t call French a sexist language just because it has gender specific articles (e.g. le and la ), would we? Kabbalah’s apparent hierarchical structure is also misleading. Panta Ra (Heraclitus): “ Everything flows” … both ways. What trickles down bubbles up and vice versa. Likewise, the apparent crystallization of process into self-contained Sefirot belies the more complex structure of Kabbalah. Pan in Panti (Anaxagoras): Everything in everything. Each Sefirah ‘contains’ or ‘reflects’ (think Leibniz’ Monads) the other 9, but each Sefirah predominately showcases one particular aspect of the life process. So, Victory is in Understanding, Strength is a component of Love, etc. And of course, Keter (Godhead) and Malkut (World) are in all as all are in them. Understanding how each Sefirah contains the other Serifot is an important part of mystical practice. A 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, developed a cosmology consistent with Kabbalah. His ‘center column’ linked the Primordial (conceptual) Nature of God ( Keter ) and the Consequent (physical) Nature ( Malkhut ) through a series of ‘actual entities’ (events) that exhibit both the conceptual (Beauty) and the physical (Foundation) aspects of the divine nature ( Keter ). Once again, with Whitehead as with Kabbalah, it is essential to note that influences flow both ways, down from Keter to Malkhut , up from Malkhut to Keter . Actual entities , the stuff of the Universe, originate in the contrast (the gap, Ginnungagap in Norse Mythology) between conceptual values and physical realities. Actual entities inject divine values (e.g. beauty) into material reality and release physical reality into the mind of God. Whitehead’s analogous term for Yesod is ‘Superject’ and for Malkhut , ‘Objective Immortality’ (our ‘footprints in the sand’). The procreative function (understood broadly) is jointly motivated by the conceptual appreciation of beauty and the physical recognition of need (desire). So our three central column ‘pillars of wisdom’ connect conceptual values (Keter) with appreciation (Beauty), appreciation with procreation (Foundation), and procreation with immortality (Malkhut). Our remaining four ‘pillars’ connect the 3 masculine Sefirot and the 3 feminine Serot . These connections are somewhat less intuitive. For example, Wisdom ( Chokmah ) links with Love ( Chesed ) which links with Victory ( Netzach ), while Understanding ( Binah ) links with Strength ( Gevurah ) which links with Splendor ( Hod ). These are what Whitehead would call ‘subjective forms’, i.e. ways in which the core process (above) might be experienced in different contexts. To understand this, we need to dig deep into the ancient/medieval mindset. The feminine side is the more easily understood. Binah is the womb; it is in Binah (Understanding) that Wisdom gains application to the World. Strength and Splendor are two traits readily associated with the so-called ‘feminine ideal’; all together these Sefirot work to support the central procreative process. The rationale for the masculine side of things is more obscure (surprise, surprise). Today at least, nobody would reasonably claim that masculinity enjoys a special connection to Wisdom or Love or Victory (Achievement)…no one who hoped to live beyond sunset that is. I think it is more helpful to understand the gender terms as placeholders for the active and passive aspects of events. Strictly speaking, there are no active/passive relationships in Kabbalah. Everything takes place in the Middle Voice . As we say above, all process is reciprocal. However, the right and left ‘wings’ could be understood as the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ aspects of events that occur in the central column (between Godhead and the World). The medieval system of Kabbalah bridges the gap between 5th century BCE pre-Socratic philosophy (Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, et al.) and 20th century CE Process Philosophy (Whitehead). While the West was mesmerized by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, Kabbalah kept the pre-Socratic tradition alive until it could be born anew in the Age of Aquarius as Relativity, Holography, Quantum Mechanics, and Entanglement. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back Enlightenment! David Cowles “It is often said that victors write history. That is even truer when the war is cultural rather than political.” Whenever history decides to grade itself…beware! ‘Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment’ – see a pattern here? it all sounds so cheery. And why shouldn’t it? Someone turned European History into a ‘self-graded class’, and like any self-respecting fifth grader (think Bart Simpson), History’s given itself an A. What about what went before? What happened between Rome and Renaissance? We’re talking religion before it was ‘fixed’ by Martin Luther, art before it was ‘fixed’ by the introduction of perspective, and the feudal system before it was ‘fixed’ by capitalism and the idea of constitutional government. This year, Sister Martha Mary decided to change again the way students are graded in her class. Instead of students grading themselves, each student is now graded by another member of the class. Guess what? Not an A in sight…but lots of C’s, D’s and, oh so many F’s. Does it surprise you that 10-year-olds are harder on others than they are on themselves? (Guess you never had siblings!) Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment: consider the words carefully! Now what would you call periods of history that were none of those things? Why you’d have to call them ‘Dark Ages,’ obviously. And History has obliged. It is often said that victors write history. That is even truer when the war is cultural rather than political: Our culture is who we are, our politics are what we are. (My apologies to Karl Marx.) In the June 27, 2022, edition of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS), we explored the difference between Faith (who we are) and Belief (what we are) . We are grandchildren of the Enlightenment. Sir Isaac Newton (c. 1700) flipped a switch, et voila, “Fiat Lux” . At that moment, the clouds were swept away and for the first-time humanity was able to see the world ‘as it is,’ without the camouflage of religion: No God, no Spirit, no Soul…this world is Nietzsche’s sand box. If you’re into science and technology, the Enlightenment is your era! It was a period of unparalleled invention and discovery, but also a period of war, tyranny, and myriad atrocities. But I digress. I said earlier that the Enlightenment was a period of invention… Was, not is! The period misnamed ‘Enlightenment’ is mercifully over…though our politicians, generals and terrorist leaders apparently missed the memo. The Enlightenment turned out to be an ouroboros. Like the Vacuum Monster is the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine , it consumed itself. Most often, epochal shifts occur when a ‘better idea’ replaces the current paradigm. That could have happened here…but it didn’t. Revolutionary discoveries in science (1900 – 1930) were a death sentence for the Enlightenment…but gracelessly, it insisted on exhausting every avenue of appeal. And it’s not done yet! Like President Trump, it’s still looking for 12,000 votes in Georgia. Enlightenment’s paradigms of materialism and causality were demolished by the discoveries of Planck, Einstein, and the ‘Quantum Mechanics.’ But instead of ‘exiting stage right’ as scripted, Enlightenment has refused to leave, even though its final scene is long since played out. Unlike the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Enlightenment did not “go gentle into that good night;” it raged against the dying of its imaginary light. Enlightenment refused to leave the stage before ‘the fat (sic) lady (Brunhilda)’ sang; and boy did she ever sign! Fittingly, Brunhilda’s final aria in Wagner’s “Ring” also heralded the collapse of a civilization preserved now only in Norse Mythology (The Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda )…and Marvel comics. The demise of the Enlightenment played on two stages. Stage right: Fascism. Stage left: Stalinism. Though mortal enemies on paper, these two ideologies both see the world through the paradigm of mechanization. Human beings are essentially machines and human society is akin to an assembly line: an arrangement of resources designed to maximize the production of goods and services…especially goods. Think nuclear! An atomic bomb can be understood as the self-annihilation of matter. Now think the self-annihilation of Enlightenment: Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Gulag archipelago. Hitler, Stalin and their ‘gangs’ were determined to make the world safe for mechanization, i.e., the transformation of human beings and their social systems into ‘machines.’ To do so, they needed to rid the world, or at least Europe, of competing ideologies: Judaism (especially Hasidism and Kabala), Catholicism, Orthodoxy, tribalism (allegiance to smaller, more culturally focused groups), and individualism (in philosophy, in art and in lifestyle). Image: Reading of Voltaire 's tragedy of the Orphan of China in the salon of Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin in 1755, by Lemonnier , c. 1812. 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 Next

< Back Dante and the Yellow Submarine David Cowles “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straightway was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense…So bitter is it that death is hardly more.” (Dante, Inferno , Canto I) “Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night… and this is only Thursday morning.” (Ringo Starr, Yellow Submarine ) 650 years after Dante Alighieri completed his Divine Comedy , a rock and roll band from Liverpool retraced his steps. In 1968, they released a modern, ostensibly secular version of Dante’s epic. Yellow Submarine ( YS ) did for the Divine Comedy ( DC ) what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet …but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done! Still, the resonance between these two works is inescapable. Dante lived in the theocratic Middle Ages while the Beatles rose to prominence in the hyper-secular ‘60’s. Apparently, “the fundamental things (do continue to) apply as time goes by” ( Casablanca ). Fittingly, YS opens with a Beatles’ favorite, Eleanor Rigby . It is hard to imagine a song better suited to accompany Dante’s evening in the woods…or Ringo’s morning in Liverpool: “Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear… No one was saved…Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came….” Not exactly Christmas music! But it certainly prepares Dante, Ringo, and us for what’s ahead. As we shall see, Eleanor Rigby describes the World, not only as it is but as it must be…provided it lacks any transcendent dimension (i.e. provided it is wholly self-contained). Dante meets the Roman poet Virgil who offers to be his guide through Hell: “Thou must take another road if thou wouldst escape from this savage place.” ( Inferno , Canto I) Back in Liverpool, Ringo meets his own ‘spirit guide’, Admiral Fred. Virgil takes Dante, not through Tuscany but on a path perpendicular to spacetime itself – a path normally traveled only by the dearly departed. ‘Young’ Fred does the same for Ringo and his pals. We are familiar with the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead , the Jewish Kadish and the Christian Last Rites . These are prayers recited or texts read aloud at the time of a person’s death. The purpose is to facilitate the transition from mortality to eternity. While neither recited nor screened bed side, DC and YS should both be considered part of our multicultural funerary tradition. Both offer detailed images of the stages connecting the angst of Liverpool/Florence with the joy of Pepperland/Paradise. “Abandon all hope, ye that enter here,” reads the sign posted above Hell’s gate. The souls in Hell no longer have the capacity for change. They cannot repent and they cannot influence events in the spatiotemporal world. They are defined now by their sins, and they are compelled to live out those sins eternally. They are expressions of determinism. Dante’s Hell is a spiral; all roads, all rungs, lead to Satan. It is a perverse version of Frost’s Two Roads . As Dante and Virgil descend lower and lower in the narrowing gyre, Hell starts to ‘freeze over’, quite literally. At bottom, they encounter Satan, encased in ice; here is the nadir of all being, a metaphor for Absolute Zero, a foretaste of the cosmic ‘heat death’ that awaits us all. Note : Satan and God share an unusual ontological feature. God is Good per se …but also the Agent of Good in the World. Likewise, Satan is the Agent of Entropy (disorder)…as well as being Disorder itself. This is not to suggest any sort of ontological parity between God and Satan, but that is a topic for another day! This is not the end! Immediately, Dante and Virgil discover that their direction has changed. They are no longer descending; they are starting to ascend Mount Purgatory on the way to Paradise. The first and last verses of Paradiso sum it up: “The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe…the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Back in England (1968), the Beatles are preparing to embark on their own mystical journey. Pepperland has succumbed to an invasion of giants known as “Blue Meanies”. Young Fred, the Beatles’ Virgil, recently appointed Lord Admiral of the Pepperland Fleet , has just escaped in, of course, a yellow sub (what else?). Its idyllic tranquility shattered, its population “bonked” into a zombie-like state of suspended animation, Pepperland land itself is laid waste (as in the Grail legends). The once rainbow-colored countryside is now a monochrome gray. Just as Paradise was lost but later regained (Milton), so Pepperland has been captured and must now be liberated. Ringo, led by the Admiral and accompanied by his three musical pals, proceeds through a gate of his own. The sign atop this gate simply reads “The Pier”…apt, for this is the launch site for the Beatles’ triumphant Free Pepperland campaign. The Pepper Path runs through a series of “seas” (or branes) that challenge every preconception our travelers have regarding the nature of reality. The first three seas deconstruct the phenomenal world into its basic elements: Time, Space, and Stuff (energy manifested as matter and force). Each of these Seas in turn undergoes its own particular deconstruction. First, the Sea of Time. Our time appears to flow one way (from past to future) at a steady rate – so steady that we hardly notice it. Real time flows at a variable rate and it flows backwards as well as forwards. In New England they constantly talk about ‘the weather’; in Olde England, apparently, they constantly talk about ‘the time’. The plodding phenomenal time that we take for granted turns out to be a very particular expression of multifarious noumenal time. Of course, if time is reversible, then whatever exists can be erased, retroactively…all of which leads to what I call, the Nihilist Conjecture : “Anything that can happen does happen; what can be will be and what cannot be won’t be; everything can be erased and all erasure is retroactive; therefore, everything that ever will be erased has already been erased; and nothing that has been erased ever was; therefore, nothing is, and since nothing is, nothing was and nothing can be, since nothing can come from nothing (Parmenides et al.).” This Nihilist Doxology challenges the competing Christian version: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” “To be or not to be” was never the question; the question has always been, paraphrasing the jazz favorite, “Is there is or is there ain’t a world?” Because if there is a world, then the Nihilist Conjecture (‘no world is possible’) has been falsified. So is there a world? The second sea, the Sea of Science, does for space what its predecessor did for time . As with time (clocks), human representations of space (Cartesian grids, Platonic solids) determine what space is. Dimensionality is flexible and not an essential aspect of ‘extension’. The third sea, the Sea of Monsters, deconstructs the material world including the phenomenon of life . It shows that what we consider ‘variety’ in our world is, in fact, a very limited and highly selective subset of all the structures and qualities that spacetime could support…and, according to the Beatles, does support. YS anticipates Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life . In the Sea of Monsters, all possible ‘life’ forms flourish: “Let 1,000 flowers bloom” (Mao). Shape is continuously and indefinitely mutable. All boundaries separating the organic from the mechanical have been dissolved. Platonic forms have replaced by a Chinese menu of customizable combos : “My partner and I would like to order Combo #3, Combo #7, and Combo #12…and we’ll be sharing everything.” What we accept as ‘our prix fixe world’ is the artifact of a limited imagination. This third sea is aptly named. All the creatures are indeed ‘monsters’, not because of how they look or how they are made but because of how they behave (like some children I’ve known – not mine, or yours, of course). Without exception, they are involved in activities that are destructive to themselves and to others. One might question the adaptive advantage of such behavior, but Darwin is not on trial…at least not today. The Beatles’ monsters act exactly like the souls in Dante’s Inferno . Their natures are hard-wired, and they don’t have the capacity to overcome their ‘programming’. They are well outside the ‘state of grace’. Among the various monsters in this sea, one stands out: the Vacuum Monster (VM). As its name suggests, it is the nature of this creature to suck up whatever it encounters. In the “monstrous sea”, creatures threaten other creatures, but the VM threatens everything, first its fellow monsters, then spacetime, and finally, itself alone . The Vacuum Monster is the personification of entropy. In YS , the inexorable process of dematerialization is accelerated. Dante’s Satan, like Evil ( deliver us from… ) in the Lord’s Prayer, is the personification of ‘negation’; and nothing negates like entropy. Sure enough, VM sucks up all the other monsters. Then, seeing that there are no other monsters to suck, it sucks up spacetime, then itself, tail first, like an ouroboros, “into oblivion…or even further”. Like the souls in Hell, the monsters in Yellow Submarine are compelled to act out their destructive personae, even though that activity per se is the source of their desolation. Been there! If any proto-World must self-annihilate, then that World does not exist, never did exist, and never will exist, cannot exist. According to this model, unless anchored to some objective reference point beyond itself, it is inevitable that any possible world would self-annihilate; and if all possible worlds are doomed to annihilation, then no World can possibly exist…ever. Yellow Submarine begins ostensibly as a secular ontology, but it ultimately proves that no consistent secular ontology is possible, other than hardcore Nihilism, which is really an anti-ontology. We are faced with a modern version of Pascal’s Wager . Granted we cannot know for sure whether or not there is a world, we have to put our chips somewhere. At this craps table, the Don’t Come pays Zero; so a Pass Line bet is the only rational option, however distasteful that might be. “I set before you Life and Death, therefore choose (even crappy) Life.” (Deuteronomy 30: 19) Of course, VM does its worst, and predictably we are left with no time, no space, and no stuff. Like Dante before them, our lads have reached the nadir of being, an empty state which the Beatles appropriately call, “Nowhere Land”. This would seem to be the end of our voyage…the end of all voyages in fact…the end of us. But no! It turns out to be just the beginning. As Mary Tudor said, “My end is my beginning.” Nowhere Land may be located at the nadir of Being but, as Dante discovered, your very next step takes you in a different, more positive direction, in his case up Mount Purgatory toward Paradise. But first, it turns out that Nowhere Land isn’t exactly empty after all. It’s not a void. It’s more like the world, as the Book of Genesis describes it, just before creation: "…The earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” Not much of a vacation destination to be sure (I’ve been to worse), but not quite empty either. In ‘nearly empty’ Nowhere Land, there remains an irreducible proto-being by the name of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. The Beatles aptly call him “Nowhere Man”. Dr. Boob (‘JHB’) is quite literally what’s left of a world after its total annihilation. JHB, you see, is pure information – but that information is so disorganized that it cannot know that it knows what it knows …and it cannot be harnessed to do any sort of ‘work’. So it does not pass the ‘Bateson/Whitehead Ontological Test’: it is not a difference that makes a difference. So JHB does not exist in any accepted sense of the word; he’s Being’s ghost. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes have the power to annihilate everything that falls through their event horizons; but he also showed that these same holes radiate that information back into the cosmos. The Boob is that information. He’s all hair, no head . According to the oldest-known Western philosopher, Anaximander, ‘actual being’ comes about only when two or more ‘potential beings’ grant each other “reck”. Unlike the souls in Dante’s Inferno and the creatures in the Monstrous Sea, Anaximander’s proto-beings avoid the allure of mutual self-destruction and decide, independently of one another (that’s essential) to let each other be ( Let it Be – Beatles). They do not do this out of any hope of personal gain or out of any expectation of reciprocity; they do it out of agape , non-thetic, unconditional Love . Here's how Disney would portray the moment of creation: Our hero is a disembodied voice on the edge of the abyss, crying out, “I grant you reck. I know not who you are or even if you are. Would you mean me well or ill? ‘Here’s no great matter’ (Eliot). I grant you reck, unconditionally…come what may, just because it’s the right thing to do.” Being is Value. This is a decision that all of us in the living world make every day. Every time we treat another as we would want to be treated, with no consideration of ‘results’, and no expectation of ‘reciprocity’, we co-create the universe with God. The souls in Hell do not have this opportunity; by their unrepented sins they have forfeited it. Neither do the creatures in Sea of Monsters; they are destined to destroy themselves and everything around them. There is no native Love in Hell, nor in the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters. So, where does totally selfless Love come from? What is its origin? In a universe powered by mutually assured destruction, the decision to let a potential adversary exist, placing your own existence at risk in the process, is utterly unnatural . Therefore, it has to originate outside the ‘natural’, spatiotemporal, material world. The Love that drives the universe cannot originate inside that universe. (It might have done, but that option is ruled out by the Nihilist Conjecture .) Love is a precondition of World; World cannot be a precondition of Love. The source of Love must be transcendent. For Dante, that means Paradise; for the Beatles, Pepperland. Take your pick! JHB does not (actually) exist, but he does have the potential to exist. He is in a coherent quantum state. He needs someone (or something) to grant him reck. Enter the Beatles! They choose to befriend the Nowhere Man: “Mr. Boob, you can come with us if you like…we’ll take you somewhere.” As a member of the crew, JHB finds purpose and, with that purpose, he begins to organize his information so that he can use it to ‘make a difference’…which, ultimately, he does. He exists! He becomes a full-fledged ‘person’ after all…Pinocchio, a ‘real boy’. But note: he does not organize himself; he is dependent on something outside of him: Value manifested as Purpose. The Beatles and the Boob grant each other reck and, as Anaximander predicted, ontogenesis ensues (2500 years later)! But to be born out of mutual reck, out of Love, is not to exist merely in the spatiotemporal, material realm; it is to exist in an eternal realm as well. Being is transcendental. To be is to transcend space, time, and matter/energy. It is our thesis that a cosmos limited to space, time and materiality, i.e., a secular universe, is impossible; it cannot exist. Sidebar : It may not be possible to prove directly that there is and must be a transcendent dimension to the World. But it may be possible, using a reductio ad absurdum , to prove that a Universe without a transcendent dimension cannot exist. In that case, the debate must shift to Descartes’ question: Is there something rather than nothing? Is there anything that can justify my saying with complete confidence, “ Sum ” or better yet, “ Est ”? (According to Descartes, there is: it’s “ Cogito ”.) The Beatles have dealt with Time and Space and Life itself; so what’s next? You guessed it, Mind: the Foothills of the Headlands , the land of disembodied thoughts. Its inhabitants want to help the Beatles on their journey, but they can’t. Like Dante’s souls in Purgatory, these creatures are immaterial and powerless to bring aims to fruition. Sleeping yet. Put on some coffee because here’s where things really get interesting! Our next stop is the legendary Sea of Holes, the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of figure/ground is reversed. The sea itself is now the ground, and the holes in that ground now constitute the figure. Nothing has become concrete, so concrete that Ringo is actually able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket. The topology of this sea is non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of direction, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. But if the Sea of Holes is non-orientable, then the entire universe in which it is embedded, including Liverpool and Pepperland, must also be non-orientable, albeit less obviously so. We may say that the universe is locally orientable but globally non-orientable because it has the Sea of Holes embedded in it. Think of the world we live in: Earth appears flat (locally) but I’m told it’s round (globally). Dante had his experience of non-orientability on the threshold of Purgatory. “I raised my eyes and thought to see Lucifer as I had left him; and I saw his legs held upward.” ( Inferno , Canto XXXIV) Just as Dante and Virgil turn to leave Hell, Dante looks back and is surprised to see Satan upside down, a reversal of orientation that is the trademark of non-orientable spaces. The Sea of Holes leads to Pepperland…but not so fast! You may only enter through an infinitely thin membrane (an event horizon?) called the “Sea of Green”… and only one of the holes in the Sea of Holes connects to the Sea of Green…and there are innumerable holes to choose from. One could easily spend ‘a lifetime’ searching for the one hole that connects to the Sea of Green and on to Pepperland…and never find it. Neither Dante nor the Beatles can reach their goal without the intervention of grace . Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the Sea of Green, and when they do, they immediately find themselves in Pepperland. Remarkably, Pepperland looks a lot like Liverpool, i.e., it’s drab…and lonely. But the Beatles quickly “unbonk” the Lord Mayor with “a snatch of a tune” and “ready the land to rebellion”. It is only now that they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of Pepperland’s permanent residents, the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In fact, the Beatles are the Sergeant Pepper Band! ‘The Beatles’ under the aspect of spacetime, they are ‘Sergeant Pepper’ under the aspect of eternity. Together, the historical Beatles and the eternal Pepper Band use music to restore Pepperland to its former glory. The Battle Hymn of their Republic: All you need is Love! The Blue Meanies are routed. But in the spirit of Love, the Beatles offer reconciliation: “Hello there, blue people. Won’t you join us?” And of course, they do: “Yes, let’s mix, Max!” Pepperland is restored. Welcome to Paradise! And a special thanks to Dante and Ringo for being our ‘spirit guides’ along the way. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Holy Days 2024. Share Previous Next