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< Back John Vianney David Cowles Aug 2, 2022 “He used to travel…to isolated barns for clandestine Masses…” (I am indebted to The Pilot , Boston, 7/28/22, for Vianney’s words and for the details of Vianney’s life.) Aletheia Today is all about seeing the world in different ways and living out those differences in our lives. Meet Fr. John Vianney. He saw things differently and he lived his life accordingly. On August 4, the Roman Catholic Church will celebrate the life of this 19th century parish priest, the cure of Ars in rural France. As a young boy during the bloodiest years of the French Revolution, John used to travel with his parents in the middle of night to isolated barns for clandestine Masses with hunted priests as volunteer sentinels kept vigil. The penalty for getting caught, for clergy, hosts, and attendees alike, was the guillotine. Nevertheless, the Vianney family deemed attending Mass, worshiping the Son of God made man in the Eucharist, and receiving him, important enough to die for. In Vianney’s mind, martyrdom was a small price to pay for the physical presence of Jesus. "All good works taken together do not equal the sacrifice of the Mass, because they are the works of men (sic), and the holy Mass is the work of God. The martyr is nothing in comparison, because martyrdom is the sacrifice that man makes to God of his life while the Mass is the sacrifice that God makes for man …" Roman Catholics (and members of some other Christian denominations) believe that in the sacrifice of the Mass, we participate in Christ's sacrifice on Calvary. In the consecration, bread and wine are totally changed into Jesus Christ, really, truly, and substantially present under sacramental appearances ... "He is there!" Vianney would often preach amidst tears, reminding his people that God himself was among them on the altar and in the tabernacle. "…We are like someone who dies of thirst next to a river, just needing to bend down the head to drink, or like a poor man next to a treasure chest, when all that is needed is to stretch out the hand." Image: St. John Vianney Credit: Joachim Schäfer - Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back What’s the Matter with Santa Claus? David Cowles “Do you remember when and why you stopped believing in Santa?” I have always been bothered by Santa Claus . He was a big part of my growing-up and I remember clearly ‘the hour I first disbelieved’ (c. age 6). The idea of adults teaching their children something they know to be untrue is troubling to say the least. I mean, we teach them enough falsehoods without meaning to; there’s no reason to exacerbate our crime with deliberate deceit. Adults justify their behavior with the age-old soporific, “It’s for the children.” If only! In fact, whenever someone says, “It’s for the children,” or “It’s for their own good,” you know it isn’t. We teach kids about Santa Claus in an attempt to recapture some trace of the forgotten wonder of our own childhoods. But kids have no need for our foolish nostalgia. They already live in an enchanted world. Made-up talismans only serve to confuse them as they try to piece together a map of that world. Lying is probably not best practices , but I justify telling lies every single day – to my fellow jaded adults; and I’m not apologizing for it. Lying to children, on the other hand, can be a serious offense. We have no less than Jesus for an authority, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42) Not the end I was hoping for! Do you remember when and why you stopped believing in Santa? For me at least, as I continued to work out my mappa mundi , Santa gradually emerged as an ‘odd man out’. The more I learned about ‘the real world’, the less space I found for an inhabited North Pole, flying reindeer, chimney transport, and a global same day package delivery service. (This was long before FedEx.) Eventually, the cognitive dissonance became unbearable. It was suddenly easier to reconcile the idea that adults were lying to me than that Sidney Greenstreet (‘a certain fat man’ – Casablanca ) was responsible for my Christmas morning. I remember that day, where I was and who I was with, because it was a really big moment. It was a ‘Station of the Cross’ for me. It was also the day when everything began to fall into place: “Maybe I can make sense of this world after all. Maybe, if I rule out every sort of magic, any trace of enchantment…” And so, I took a bite of the apple, gained knowledge, and ‘grew up’. Sorry, Peter (Pan, not Cephas). So of course, when I became an adult and had children and grandchildren of my own, there was no Santa Claus in our house, was there? You bet there was! I’m every bit as much a wimp as you. Maybe we didn’t push Santa quite as hard as my parents had: no letters to the North Pole, no cookies and milk. But still…we had Santa. Now that I am on the ‘other slope’ of that giant Gaussian Mountain (aka Bell Curve) we call a ‘human life’, I’m realizing that the world is enchanted after all. I mean, come on! Big bangs, quantum tangles, half-live cats, DNA – it’s a wonderland. But it’s not easy to overcome my primal disenchantment. I’m jaded now. So just as I tried to retain Santa as a part of my six-year-old’s world view, now I try to reduce experience to fit into the categories of so-called Science . Just as I once struggled to keep a place for Santa on my ‘world map’, now I struggle to keep out every trace of enchantment. As a stepchild of the 20th century ( nee c. 1200 CE), I feel compelled to explain the universe entirely in terms of itself…despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I need to give that up. I need to rediscover wonder, but on my way, I’ll need the support of some authorities. Once again, I turn first to OG Jesus of Nazareth (aka, the Christ), “…Unless you turn and become like children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18: 3) For my second source, I turn, appropriately, to a child. One morning, my youngest daughter heard two of my grandsons arguing: A: “You don’t believe in Santa Claus.” B: “Yes I do!” A: “Santa Claus doesn’t exist.” B: “Everything exists !” One grandchild (B) had a broader, more inclusive ontology than his brother (A). A few years later, he might have retorted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, A, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Next

< Back Childhood Lost David Cowles “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but children are from the planet Mercury.” Everybody ‘loves’ children, well almost everybody. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of raising a baby to adulthood. Then they spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire others to raise that baby for them: baby sitters, nannies, au pairs, governesses, teachers, camp counselors, scout leaders, coaches, etc. I was loved as a child, but I was bundled off to camp (day, then overnight) for a full 8 weeks every summer for 11 long and lonely years (age 3 through 13). At the time, I was told that it was ‘for my own good’ but later my parents admitted that it was really ‘for their own sanity’. Do you ever watch YouTube videos of competent adults interacting with children? Some of them are awesome! But have you noticed that they all have one thing in common? They never run more than 20 minutes! Because that’s the maximum amount of time that an empathetic and motivated adult can interact happily and constructively with a child. How come? Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but children are from the planet Mercury. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, “They’re hot!” Mars and Venus have ‘years’ roughly similar to Earth’s; Mercury’s ‘year’ lasts only 88 days! Yup, children are from Mercury…definitely. Objectively, children ‘move and grow’ (not just physically) 4 times faster than we do (365/88 > 4), but that means subjective time flows 4 times more slowly for them than it does for us. What we call ‘an 8 hour day’ feels like 32 hours to a child. Alternatively, a child works a full 8 hour shift just between the hours of 9 and 11 in the morning. No wonder child labor is so profitable: 4x the productivity, ½ the cost (wage)! Suppose someday we do find intelligent life elsewhere in our Universe; now imagine that life operates with a sense of time that is ‘distorted’ (vs. ours) by 400%. Can you envision any problems? Well, we don’t have to wait for SETI to find out; it’s already happened. Every day, flocks of storks bring babies from Mercury and deliver them to Terrestrial parents to ‘raise’. My maternal grandmother told the story of an elementary school teacher who said to her, “Marguerite, I know you mean well…but you don’t do well!” For the most part, Earth parents do ‘mean well’…at least they mean to mean well…but almost all of us fail to ‘do well’. John Lennon captured the gist of the problem on his Working Class Hero album: “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.” My parents gave me plenty of time…sometimes more than I would have liked. But 100% of my parents’ time only accounted for 25% of my time. That left plenty of opportunity for anxiety, depression, sadness, boredom and, of course, my favorite, mischief. Children are born virtually immobile and 100% dependent ‘on the kindness of strangers’ (that’s us , BTW). They have no map of our world; they do not know our customs or our language. They don’t even know what language is, or what it does. Children are ‘barbarians’ – not just metaphorically, but also literally (they don’t speak a word of Ancient Greek). Six Mercurial years (18 Earth months) later, most children are mobile, communicative, and incipiently self-sufficient, leaving their parents bewildered and spent…and advertising on Indeed for Help! Yet as every parent knows, 18 months is still early innings . According to the anthropology of the Hopi, children are born (or stork delivered) with two questions in mind: “Who am I? Why am I here?” Big questions! You may still be asking those same questions, even at your overly advanced age. At best, these questions are not easy. So, of course, we want to help. We want to help our children know themselves and fulfill their purpose in the world. But to help, we would need to know ourselves and our purpose, and of course, we don’t! So instead, we teach our kids what we were taught. Our parents failed us, and we want to make sure our children get no less from their parents than we got from ours. Sounds reasonable? Ok, how’s this for a home mission statement: “The purpose of life is to make a constructive contribution to society…to leave the world a better place. The purpose of childhood is to learn to be an adult who can make such a contribution.” Put this on the fridge instead of a list of rules (and consequences). Harry Chapin said it best, “He’d grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.” ( Cat’s in the Cradle ) Unlike many of us, Chapin’s hero-narrator ultimately realizes his own life’s failures; he regrets them as they appear in him but especially as they are reflected in his son. Be careful what you wish for. Chapin’s hero wanted a son who would grow up to be just like him and he got just that! Too late, he realizes that he failed to make the most of his own life’s opportunities, and much worse, he realizes now that he has ensured his son will never optimize his own life potential either. What hubris we display, wanting our children to relive our lives! As youngish adults ourselves, we ask (force) them to internalize our own still unexamined ethos: “Grow up, get an education, raise a family, earn a living, make a career, contribute to society, leave a legacy.” And how did that work out for 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 Next

< Back Teaching Physics in the 21st Century David Cowles 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. (Editor’s Note: ATM Issue #1 included a feature article, Science & The Yellow Submarine – Part I . As promised, Part II will be published in ATM Issue #3 (9/1/2022). In the meantime, 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 4 through 8, all based on the Yellow Sub.) “Physics is too hard…and it’s oh so boring! Besides, when will I ever use it?” Sound familiar? These are the same complaints we’ve heard from students for generations. Heck, I probably said the very same things myself when I was in high school. 125 years ago, lack of formal training in the ‘hard sciences’ was no obstacle to understanding, appreciating, and participating in the world. After all, science still more or less accepted the tenets of ‘naïve realism’: i.e., the world for the most part is the way it appears to be. High school dropouts and Ivy League professors shared this same basic world view. The principal task of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment (1700 – 1900) was to explain how it is that things are the way they are and to explore how those things could be put to work for our benefit. It did not ask why because the assumption from the start was that there is no why; what is just is! Although he probably didn’t realize it at the time, the physicist Enrico Fermi blew the top off this Newtonian world view in 1900 after conducting a series of rather arcane experiments. Fermi asked how so-called ‘black bodies’ emit radiation. Commonsense suggests that radiation emitted by a black body should be made up of a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Fermi’s experiments showed that commonsense was wrong. ( Side bar : At the time this conclusion was startling. Today, we would just say, oh well, commonsense is wrong again – as usual!) Fermi discovered that radiation emitted by a black body is emitted, not across a continuous spectrum of wave lengths, but at one of just a few discrete wavelengths. Radiation might be emitted with a wavelength of X or a wavelength of Y but not with a wavelength somewhere between X and Y. Of course, the scientific establishment’s initial reaction was to doubt the experimental results, and failing that, to tweak the Newtonian model as little as possible to accommodate the new data. The ‘academy’ responded in just this way to every new scientific breakthrough. First reaction, “there’s something wrong with the data”; and when that argument collapses, “how can we tweak the prevailing model as little as possible?” Prior to Galileo, and even afterwards in some quarters, each new astronomical observation was shoehorned into the Ptolemaic model, tweaking that model as little as possible to accommodate the new data points. Awful, right? Wrong! The scientific community is doing just exactly what it should be doing: responding to new data, first with healthy skepticism, and then by ‘minimally modifying’ its current models to accommodate the vetted new data. We wouldn’t have it any other way! Think of it as an extension of Occam’s Razor. But sometimes, this conservative strategy breaks down. Galileo and Copernicus, for example, realized that the new astronomical data could not be reasoned away or neatly folded into the Ptolemaic model. Sometimes, as the Cars pointed out in their hit song, Drive , “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong!” Sometimes, revolution is the only option. Who among us, sitting on his recliner, drinking a beer, and watching the game on TV, is anxious for revolution? But it happens, and when it happens, Katie bar the door: it’s open season and there are no sacred cows; the entire corpus of scientific ‘knowledge’ is opened to scrutiny. That’s just what happened, beginning in 1900. A year earlier, few scientists, if any, thought that Newtonian cosmology would ever be replaced by a different framework. Who could even imagine what such a framework might look like? The validity of Newton’s scheme seemed unassailable; today it lies in shambles! 20th century scientists painstakingly dismantled Newton’s model, unraveling the entire ball of yarn that was 19th century cosmology. First, Einstein showed that space and time, assumed to be ultimate physical constants, were in fact ‘relative’ to one other and to mass and to motion. Then another gaggle of geeks built a fresh model of the universe based on Fermi’s findings. The new model included discrete packets of energy (quanta) in lieu of a smooth spectrum of continuous values. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that pretty much everything we thought we knew in 1899 about the structure of the universe was wrong! So far, so good. It is entirely appropriate that new scientific paradigms should replace older theories and their retreads. But still, ‘something’s wrong.’ In 1899, a high school dropout had about the same view of the universe as a member of Harvard’s physics faculty. Today, only a handful of non-specialists understand the latest developments in theoretical and experimental physics, and this is a problem. Given a test, I wager that 95% of American adults would describe the universe in essentially Newtonian terms. Outside of science fiction (thank God for sci-fi), Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have for the most part not yet spilled out of the academy into the streets. As a result, we live in a world whose workings are understood by just a handful of people. “Danger, Will Robinson!” This state-of-affairs threatens the fabric of society. A tiny cadre of cognoscenti presides over the intellectual life of the planet. You might describe today’s scientifically educated as ‘Oligarchs of Information.’ In a democracy, ignorance itself can be dangerous. We ask our electorate to guide the ship of state; well and good, but are we entirely comfortable with this arrangement knowing that that guidance will likely be based on 300-year-old notions of what is real and what isn’t? For us as religious educators, the problem is even more acute. How do we teach young people about the majesty of God and the justice of his Kingdom when they are working with a mechanical model of reality? I believe the Beatles’ classic movie, Yellow Submarine (1968) can be a powerful teaching tool for students, especially for students in grades four through eight. “I know your game, Dealer! I know you’re using all this cool music and all these cool graphics just to get our kids hooked.” You’re absolutely right! That’s exactly what I’m doing. And let me tell you, if you are going to get a kid hooked on science, this is your chance! But how do we hook a kid on science if we can’t find a way to make it interesting? Not by teaching the properties of pulleys and inclined planes, that’s for sure. Fact : Science is fascinating! Young people instinctively love it. Idea : Instead of teaching science from the bottom-up (“Don’t worry, you’ll get to the interesting stuff in college”), let’s try teaching from the top down. Expose as many students as possible, as early as possible, to the mind-bending ideas of 20th century physics; then see what happens! This is the age when kids are most likely to be interested in comic books and graphic novels, and Yellow Submarine is the ultimate graphic novel (ok, film)! Are you ‘on board’ (pun intended)? Then take a look at this basic outline of a 10-unit lesson plan that turns the movie, Yellow Submarine , into a physics textbook no student can put down. ( Note : I have no preconception regarding the length or spacing of these ’10 Lessons.’ Each lesson could last an hour…or a lot longer. Each lesson could be taught in succession, one day one lesson. Or each lesson could be spaced over several class periods so that it would take 10 weeks to complete the program. The good news is, ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Any of these formats will work!) Welcome aboard! Lesson #1 : Welcome to the Yellow Submarine Introduce the Beatles, the film and the '60s culture. Watch the film together, if possible, otherwise in small groups or at home. Question: “Do we live in Pepperland? How so? How not?” Question: “Ok then, do we live in Liverpool? How so, how not?” Note students’ initial responses to both questions and compare them with what they have to say at the end of the course. Lesson # 2 : The Pier Question: “How is life on the Pier different from the life we’re used to?” Introduce the basics of Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: roughly, whatever can happen does happen… somewhere (i.e., in some ‘world’). Introduce concepts from Stephen Gould’s book, It’s a Wonderful Life : roughly, species are the way they are, but they could just as well have been very different. Could there be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy? Question: “What happens to the world when we’re not looking at it?” Does it just continue on as is? Does it continue on, but not as is? Or does it simply vanish until we look again? How do we know? Lesson # 3 : The Sea of Time Question: “What is time?” Introduce the basics of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Question: “Can you imagine a world without time?” What would it be like? Would you like to live in such a world? Question: “Ok then, can you imagine a world with time but where time somehow works differently from the way it does here?” How could time be different? Can you design a world you’d like to live in? Introduce examples from Einstein’s Dreams Introduce the topic of time travel: what are the main problems? Question: “If you could travel in time , where (what year or era) would you most like to visit? Why?” Question: “If you could move back and forth in time, what age would you choose to be? Older? Younger? Or the same age you are now? Why?” Lesson # 4 : The Sea of Science (Space) Introduce basic concepts in Topology. Question: “Can you describe the topology of our world?” Question: “Can you imagine a world with a different topology? What would it be like to live in such a world? Introduce the Platonic Solids Introduce the Holographic Principle The information content of a space is proportionate to its surface area, not its volume. Lesson # 5 : The Sea of Monsters Introduce concepts from D’arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form . Revisit concepts from Stephen Gould’s It’s a Wonderful Life . Design a life form that incorporates organs from more than one species. Design a life form that incorporates both organic and mechanical features. In what ways have we already begun to break down the barriers between species and between the organic and the mechanical? Transplanting a pig’s heart into a human Installing a Pacemaker Installing an Artificial heart Lesson # 6 : The Dreaded Vacuum Monster (VM). Question: “Why is the Vacuum Monster ‘dreaded?’ Review the actions of VM: the sequence, e.g. Introduce the concept of Entropy. Question: “How is the Vacuum Monster like Entropy?” Introduce the concept of an ‘ouroboros.’ Question: “Is our universe an ouroboros? Is it fated to consume itself?” Question: “Why does VM consume itself?” Question: “Is anything left after VM does its worst? If so, what?” Question: “Why does the Submarine and its crew survive?” Introduce Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. Lesson # 7 : Dr. Boob. Introduce the concept of Information: roughly, the difference between what is and what could have been. Analyze Dr. Boob’s dialog: “Do you speak English? ‘Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure.’ But do you speak English? "You know, I’m not sure.” Question: “What’s the difference between useful and useless information?” Question: “Does information need to ‘know’ itself to be useful?” Question: “Why do they call Dr. Boob, ‘the nowhere man?’” Question: “How does JHB go from being a ‘nowhere man’ to being a ‘somewhere man?’” “What makes someone be a somewhere person?” Lesson # 8 : The Foothills of the Headlands Question: “What would life be like if you had a mind but no body?” Question: “Would you rather be ‘embodied’ or ‘disembodied?’ Would you rather live in RL or in VR?” Question: “How is a mind different from a body? Can you have either one without the other?” Supplemental material: Max Headroom (TV Series), The Matrix (Films), Alice in Wonderland (The Cheshire Cat). Lesson # 9 : The Sea of Holes & the Sea of Green Introduce the concepts of ‘figure & ground,’ ‘being & nothingness.’ Introduce the concept of a ‘cosmic membrane,’ an ‘event horizon.’ Question: How is the Sea of Green like an event horizon? Question: “Why do you think the Beatles included a ‘Sea of Green’ on the way to Pepperland? What does it do? Why is it important?” Question: “Why do you think the Beatles made these two seas the last two seas on the journey?” Lesson # 10 :Pepperland at last! Question: “What are the main features of Pepperland? Question: “How is Pepperland like Liverpool? How is it different?” Question: “Would you want to live in Pepperland forever if you could? Why? Or why not?” Question: “Now that you know all about life in Pepperland, do you feel better or worse about your own life?” Repeat the questions from Lesson #1: “Do we live in Pepperland? How so? How not?” “Or do we live in Liverpool? How so? How not?” “Or both? If both, how both?” Let’s talk about the trip we’ve just taken: “Did you have fun?” “Along the way, did you learn anything about the world you live in?” “Can you use anything you learned from the trip to make your life better?” Provisional thesis : Like all great works of art, there will never be a ‘definitive interpretation’ of Yellow Submarine . That’s the beauty of masterpieces: they speak to everyone in every era, but they also say different things to different people – all of them valid, all of them true. My own, personal and, and totally tentative understanding? There is only one world: Pepperland, Liverpool and wherever your classroom happens to be located. Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of reality; Pepperland is the eternal aspect of the same events. The branes (seas) are layers of reality (time, space, body, mind, information, le neant ). Both Pepperland and Liverpool can be broken down into these component branes. 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 Comedy of Job David Cowles “Failure to appreciate the comic elements in Job has resulted in an almost universal misreading of the text.” Comedy? I’ve heard the Book of Job described as tragedy, wisdom, and history, but never as comedy. How can the loss of one’s family, property, health, and social standing possibly be funny? Talk about ‘dark humor;’ but trust me (or don’t), it’s hilarious! The banter between Job and his so-called ‘comforters,’ even between Job and God, is as funny as any modern sitcom–no, funnier. The best way to show this would be to recast the epic poem as a stage or screen play. But where are Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Ionesco, and Beckett when we need them? Absent a master’s touch, would you at least let me point out some of the funniest snippets of the epic? This is not a sterile exercise in literary criticism. Failure to appreciate the comic elements in Job has resulted in an almost universal misreading of the text. As we shall see, proper recognition of the comic element sets things right. The Book of Job consists of 42 chapters, 40 of which contain a magnificent epic poem, every bit the equal of Homer’s diptych. The poem is nestled between a prose Prologue and a very brief prose Epilogue. For various reasons, we will focus only on the poem itself (95% of the total text). That said, I will also ignore the 6 chapters devoted to the input of a younger comforter, Elihu. These chapters are of dubious provenance and sit inert in the middle of the text. They contribute nothing to the discussion and neither Job nor God, nor the other comforters even refer to them. The epic proper begins with Job lamenting the day of his birth. Nothing funny about this. But Job has the added misfortune of being surrounded by (false) friends, three so-called ‘comforters’, cold comfort indeed! Eliphaz speaks first. Like a pre-pubescent boy in a schoolyard, Eliphaz responds to Job’s genuine suffering and heartfelt reflection with a taunt: “It is you who have fortified the trembling, and limp arms, you have strengthened. The stumbling would your words raise up, and buckling knees would you stiffen.” Eliphaz is, of course, being facetious. He applies to Job attributes usually reserved for God. “But now that (calamity) has come to you, you cannot (bear it). It touches you yourself and you are shaken…Call out now! Does anyone answer you? ... Rather, I would seek out El (God), before Elohim (also ‘God’) I would lodge my complaint.” 21 st Century translation: “If you don’t like the way God’s treated you, sue him.” Eliphaz is urging Job to do what he himself wouldn’t dream of doing: “Let’s see if I can goad Job into doing something so stupid that God will punish him even more! How much fun would that be!” But as we shall see (much later), Job turns the tables on Eliphaz and the other comforters. He does sue God…and he wins. Eliphaz and the other comforters are properly chastised and shamed. The story of Job has a happy ending, but the road to that climax is long and tortured; and in any event, I’m getting way ahead of myself. For now, Job must be content to banter back: “Thus have you now become naught (to me); you see a terrifying sight (me) and you are seized with fear.” Like most bullies, Eliphaz’ behavior is grounded in his own insecurity…and Job knows that. Foolishly, Job continues. Does he really think we can get through to these bullies? Now a second comforter, Bildad, joins the circle of torment: “(How long) will the words of your mouth be a massive wind? …(Suffering) is the fate of all who reject El.” Of course, this is ironic, since Job alone ‘knows’ El and keeps his commandments. But what miscreant doesn’t love it when a goody-two-shoes (Job) gets his comeuppance, even when it is undeserved. Job pretty much ignores Bildad’s noise; he is still mulling over Eliphaz’s suggestion: “If one wanted to press charges against him, not once in a thousand (times) would he respond…Even in the right, I would get no response…I do not trust that he would hear my complaint…and who can convene such a legal proceeding?” As with anyone in Job’s predicament, there is an inevitable undercurrent of despair: “The earth is handed over to the wicked. He covers the eyes of its judges; if not he, then who? …I will be found guilty, so why should I strive in vain.” Now a third comforter, Zophar, joins in, “A hollow man (Job) will be filled with intelligence when a wild ass is born to a human.” In other words, when pigs fly, Job! Here, Job loses his famous patience! There’s no reasoning with these taunters. He decides to call them out, “Truly you are people of intelligence and with you, wisdom will die! …Rather ask Behemoth (hippo) and it will instruct you, or the fowl of the sky – and it will tell you. Or converse with the earth…and the fish of the sea.” Job challenges the over-intellectualized theology of his tormentors. He suggests they return to basics. In the immortal words of John, Paul, George and Ringo ( Yellow Submarine ), “Be empirical, look!” Like Heidegger and others, the Job-poet calls for a theology rooted in phenomenology, i.e., personal experience. “I would rather speak to Shaddai (another name for God); it is an argument with El I desire. But you, you are smearers of lies, false physicians, all of you. If only you would keep silent – that would be wisdom for you !” Well said, Job, but unfortunately these bullies don’t get the message. They never do! Eliphaz jumps back in: “Does ‘a sage’ utter such windy speech and fill his belly with an east wind?” To which Job answers, “Futile comforters are you all. Is there no end to (your own) windy speech?” Throughout Job’s dialogue with the comforters and later with God, the interlocutors throw each other’s words back and forth. They repeat others’ words but put them in different contexts that give them different meaning. ‘Wind/windy’ is a good example. Job is the first to use the word, “Do you regard (my) words as just wind?” A classic victim’s mistake! A modern-day Maimonides needs to publish A Guide for the Bullied . Item #1 : Don’t give your tormentors anything they can use against you. Job flunks Victimology 101. “Do you regard my words as just wind?” is translated by the tormentors as “My words are just wind!” Wind is wonderful for word play; its various meanings run up and down the semantic register. Job is into the game now: “Futile comforters are you all: is there no end to windy speech?” On one hand, “windy speech” could mean, facetiously, “spirit inspired”…or it could refer to a disorganized and meaningless blast of air. It could apply to a verbose orator, but it can also refer to a certain noisy and often smelly bodily excretion, aka a fart! After a second lame attack from Bildad, Job goes on offense . In the most famous lines in the entire poem, he succinctly summarizes his theology and warns Bildad of impending doom: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will testify on earth. From behind my skin I look out, while in the flesh I’ll see Eloah (God). Something I myself will view - what my eyes, not a stranger’s, will see…you (Bildad) had better fear the sword…you had better beware of demons.” Job is digging himself into an ever deepening pit. There may be no recovering from this; Job may need to change schools. Now Zophar joins the circle of torment, but Job cuts him short: “After I speak, you may (continue to) mock yourself ” (i.e., blather on). Yet, Job uses his tirade against Zophar to score a major point: “Should I not lose patience over evil?” The comforters are apologists for evil; they excuse God for that which is evident to their senses. Here, Job throws down the gauntlet: Evil is evil and there’s no excusing it, period! In other words, even God must be good. Today, people debate “Good without God?” Job asks a much more interesting question: “God without Good?” From our 21 st century theological perch, it is hard to appreciate how controversial this was at the time. Suffice to say, it only served to further isolate Job as a minority of one. Sidebar : There is a modern analog. In 1964, Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, addressed these words to the Republican National Convention: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” One third of the delegates walked out! Evidently, they too were willing to make peace with slavery and exploitation. Not Job! The Book of Job reads like a textbook of modern political theory: any correspondence between rhetoric and reality is entirely co-incidental. Now Eliphaz jumps back in with a tactic worthy of his 21 st century (CE) heirs. He accuses Job of precisely that crime of which Job is most innocent: exploiting the poor and neglecting their cry. It is a fabrication made from whole cloth, but hey, you can fool some of the people…, right? Like any skilled debater, Job does not give Eliphaz’ nonsense the honor of a reply; he’s already on to other things: “If you would let me know how to find him (God)…I would lay before him my lawsuit.” After a variety of legal maneuvers worthy of OJ’s Dream Team , God answers Job's summons and appears before him in a whirlwind. From the outset, God is contemptuous of his opponent and his remarks are dripping with sarcasm: “Who is this who obscures good counsel, (using) words without knowledge? ...I will ask you, and you will let me know…Tell me – if you truly know wisdom.” From here on, God’s speech consists primarily of a game of Have you Ever , punctuated with a few Double Dog Dares from A Christmas Story . He challenges Job to compare CVs with him: “Have you ever in your days summoned daybreak…Have you ever reached the sources of the Sea? ...Tell - if you know all of this. On what path dwells the light? ...You must know, for you were born then, your number of days is so many.” God is furious; he cannot contain his anger at Job’s effrontery. His words are venom tipped arrows. But notice what God does not do! He does not ‘smite Job with the jaw bone of an ass’ nor does he withdraw from the legal proceeding itself. Job is unfazed. Like Moses and Elijah, Job has anticipated God’s bluster and knows he must remain impassive if he is to get through it. Think Menelaus holding on tight to the shape-shifting Proteus. Eventually, God runs out of steam, “Should Eloah answer an accuser?” After all the ink and tears that have been spilled over this, now God questions whether he should even have responded to Job in the first place: “Maybe I should have taken the fifth…or drank a fifth.” Too late now, God, that horse is long since out of that barn. God’s rhetorical question creates an opportunity for Job to get a word in edgewise, finally, and Job makes good, but laconic, use of the opportunity: “Lacking respect, how can I answer you? My hand I place over my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not repeat – Twice, and I will no more.” For millennia critics have taken Job’s words as an apology; how could they? At the most, this is the unfelt, sarcastically toned apology of a teenager. At the very most! Ask yourself, “Who’s disrespecting whom?” Either Job has disrespected God, and so forfeited the right to answer him, or God has disrespected Job, and forfeited the right to hear Job’s answer. In the first instance, Job’s words must be understood facetiously; in the second instance, as sarcasm. Job has apparently ‘rested’ his case. God now has one last chance to make a convincing argument. Wisely, he chooses a different tack: “Will you go so far as to breach my justice? Accuse me of wrong so that you are in the right? If you’ve an arm (as strong as) El’s…crush the wicked where they stand…Then I myself will praise you.” In other words, “Just do it!” Enough with the rhetoric, Job, if you can do better, go ahead; I won’t stand in your way and the whole world is anxious to see what you can accomplish. Bill Clinton is famous for saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” In other words, stay on message. Job is famous for saying something like, “It’s justice, stupid,” and sticking to it. He must not, and he will not fall prey to God’s distractions. God closes with the tired reminiscence of an old man regaling the rest of his nursing home gang with tales of his past exploits: “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.” (Eliot) God spends his last 13 verses lionizing his creatures, Behemoth and Leviathan. One can imagine him thinking, “Yes, they are fierce, but at least they don’t talk back like you, Job.” God’s final stanza is nothing but sad, “He (Leviathan) has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he. All that is haughty he’s got in his view; over beasts of all kinds he is king.” Job has previously stated something akin to the swami’s famous line in the Beatles’ movie, Help : “I will say no more!” But like the swami, he will say more. He cannot resist ‘the last word,’ and on that ‘word’ rests the whole meaning of Job, the foundation of Judeo-Christian theology: “I have known you are able to do all; that you cannot be blocked from any scheme. (God’s defense is not responsive to Job’s complaint.) Who is this revealing counsel without knowledge? (God.) Truly, I have spoken without comprehending - wonders beyond me that I do not know. ‘Hear now and I will speak! I will ask you, and you will help me know’ (not) . As a hearing by ear I have heard you, and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on ‘dust and ashes’ (human beings).” Doesn’t it make you just want to reach out and slap him (Job that is, not God)? Oh, to be back in the 1950s! Any reader who has ever parented a teenager can put herself in God’s shoes, and any superannuated child can sympathize with Job. It’s the age-old battle of the generations, played out on the grandest of all scales. How can anyone have missed this? How come almost everyone has missed it? Answer: the incredible power of popular superstition. “God cannot be wrong, not even in an allegorical fable because he is God. What need have we of evidence…or even legal reasoning?” Theology 101 should begin with the Book of Job…and with the much older story of Job. It is a searing indictment of top-down theological reasoning. As Heidegger said, genuine philosophy (and by extension theology) must begin at the level of first person experience. We need to take ourselves more seriously…and less! We need to see the humor behind our entire endeavor. We need to eschew Sartre’s Spirit of Seriousness . God laughs at our efforts to understand him, but I hear that laughter as good-humored (not like that of Job’s comforters). We need to take a page from God’s book: lighten-up and know that I am God. **Calling all playwrights! Do you wish you’d written Waiting for Godot ? Or even Hamilton ? Now’s your chance to write a play that will leave these two triumphs in the dust. Your Comedy of Job will keep the Broadway lights on for what will seem like forever.” ** David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Age is an Algorithm David Cowles “We systematically suppress our actual experience and replace it with whatever it is we think we are supposed to experience, and we call that reality.” “Yesterday, my neighbor’s ‘12-year-old boy’ headed off to college and his ‘six-year-old baby sister’ started middle school. What’s going on here? I feel as though I turned once around, clicked my heels, and poof, the whole world changed overnight.” This may be how it seems to you, but of course, you don’t take seeming seriously. You’re educated; you know that Time is something you measure by uniform ticks of a clock (or oscillations of an EM particle). Any other way of looking at Time is childish… or a flashback to that famous acid trip you took in the ‘60s. So, here as elsewhere, we systematically suppress our actual experience ( seeming ) and replace it with what we are supposed to experience ( knowing ), and we call that reality! Of course, this has dire consequences: Constantly having to reject one’s own experience in favor of the manufactured collective experience of society leads to a loss of self-esteem; why can’t I see what others see? Too late, you realize that those others don’t actually see what they pretend to see either. We’re all gazing at the wall and cooing back and forth about the beauty of the mural painted on it…but none of us actually sees anything other than a bare wall. Asked, “And what do you think?” we spew out the same babble that we were given, thus reinforcing the consensus of the unreal . By subsuming our real experience to the imaginary collective experience of our culture, we make it just that much harder for others to honor their own experience. You should have stood your ground. While you were turning around once and clicking your heels, the world was changing…massively! Is this myth or magic? Neither…it’s math! Let’s keep it simple: I am 75, and I have a 15-year-old grandson. 5 years ago, I was 70 and he was 10. In the ensuing 5 years, I aged just over 7% (75/70) while my grandson aged exactly 50% (15/10). During that period, my grandson aged 7x more than I did. Conversely, time flowed 7x faster for me than for my grandson. No wonder he’s bored, and I can’t find enough hours in the day. Check it out: So, Time is passing 7x faster for me than it is for my grandson! My week is his day! The idea that everyone is moving through Time at the same rate is based on a long abandoned view of Time as absolute, objective reality. Einstein was the first to show that Time’s ‘flow rate’ is relative , i.e., relative to motion. What I’m suggesting goes way beyond Einstein and does not require relative motion. If we are to be true to phenomenal experience itself, we must begin our inquiry with our subjective experience of Time: how fast is Time flowing for me at my age? We have learned to self-censor. We nudge ourselves to conform our perceptions to the expectations of others. No one wants to admit that she is the only one who doesn’t know who the emperor’s wearing on the red carpet this season. It is no wonder then that we don’t seem to be making much progress, metaphysically speaking. We’ve suppressed the World we’re here to read (Joyce) and replaced it with a stripped down, Cliff Notes version that mainly reflects the ‘wisdom’ of Plato, Euclid and Newton, RIP. Today, virtually all intellectual inquiry takes place in a collectively designed, artificial universe. “They’ve paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” (Joni Mitchell) All our reasoning is therefore self-referential. We define a world a priori ; then we deduce certain theorems regarding that world. Finally, we attempt to use those same theorems to prove that the world we defined actually exists. Neat…circular…useless! Everything we do, we do with curated data and circular models. My grandest philosophical edifices amount to nothing more than “ice cream castles in the air.” (Judy Collins) We need to hit Refresh and return to Ground Zero, i.e., raw, minimally processed, subjective experience. Like a gourmand undertaking a ‘cleanse’, we need to get back on a diet of fruit and uncooked vegetables. Collectively, we must begin paying attention to our actual experiences instead of the pre-digested pseudo-experiences served-up to us at home, in school, on the job, and through the media. We must undertake a thorough epistemological self-examination: what do we believe, and why do we believe it? And we need to discard whatever is not ultimately grounded in actual experience, especially if it is inconsistent with that experience. Meanwhile, you can run the Age Algorithm™ for yourself. Fact : Time flows at different rates for people of different ages. You can use the Age Algorithm™ to calculate the relative rate of flow for any two people at any two (different) ages. You can even use it to compare Time’s flow for you at different periods of your own life: Example : you are 50 and your youngest daughter is 10. One year equals 2% of your life span, but that same year equals 10% of hers. Time flows 5x faster for you than for her. Resolved : From now on, I will ground all my philosophical inquiries in my own (subjective) experience. I will battle groupthink wherever I find it! Will you join me? Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Next

< Back Jay Terrell Contributor Joe Terrell is the creator of Instrument of Mercy , a progressive Christian blog created and written by Joe Forrest. Featuring in-depth and long-form articles regarding complex and controversial issues about faith, culture, politics, and the church, the goal of Instrument of Mercy is to foster informed and constructive dialogue and encourage radical empathy among citizens of Heaven and Earth. At the Beginning of the World: Dinosaurs, Genesis, and the Gift of Science

< Back My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” David Cowles I like my PCP. She does her best, swimming against the tide of a dysfunctional healthcare system. And let’s be clear: if I had a serious medical condition, I’d want to be treated in the U.S. and nowhere else. So I have no time for yet another tear jerking expose of American healthcare! I mean, if that’s how you feel, don’t use it, and next time a loved one needs a complex medical procedure, feel free to head off to Canada, or the UK, or Sweden - wherever you think you’ll fare better; but as you travel, be careful not to bump into ‘medical tourists’ from those countries ‘sneaking’ across our borders to get their care in the U.S. Not your cup of tea after all? Then shut it! ( Full disclosure : I worked 40 years for a company I co-founded to provide health benefits to employees of mid-sized U.S. businesses. So caveat lector .) That said, enough is enough! Prior to 2019, my interaction with the healthcare system consisted of an annual physical and a monthly prescription for a beta blocker. In the most recent 5 years, I have been admitted (overnight) to the hospital a half dozen times, ‘incarcerated’ for a total of 40 days overall. Not fun! However, I was mainly well treated and the care I received was helpful, albeit minimal. Then I stubbed my left big toe. I’ve been stubbing my toes since the age of 5. Painful but no big deal! This time, however, I damaged the nail and after a week or so it was clear that the nail was coming off, whether I liked it or not. So I called my podiatrist…who could not see me for a month. No problem. I called my PCP and made an appointment for the next day. Her PA took one look at the toe and announced, “We can’t treat this here. You’ll need to go to Urgent Care (UC).” Not a problem either! I’m a strong believer in UC; it has served my family well in the past. This time, however, the two closest UC facilities were ‘booked solid’ and ‘not seeing walk-ins’ that day; so much for ‘urgent’ care. Plus I needed an X-ray and neither had X-ray capability on site. So my PCP sent me off to the ER…for a stubbed toe! They took me in right away (glad for the revenue perhaps), but 5 hours later, I was still there. Following an X-ray, my ER Doc proudly announced, “Your right toe has a small fracture…which BTW we don’t need to treat.” Ok, but it was the left toe I stubbed! Hmm… In any event, I was sent on my way with a tetanus booster and an Rx for an antibiotic and a referral back to my Podiatrist who suddenly found he could ‘fit me in’ after all. So, all is well, right? Not even a little bit! In a country where some folks have virtually no access to healthcare, I unintentionally and unnecessarily consumed thousands of dollars’ worth…for a stubbed toe. Plus, during my week-long ordeal, I noticed that my docs were more interested in ‘ruling out what isn’t’ than they were in ‘treating what is’. They were running through a check list; they were practicing defensive medicine. They weren’t really looking at my toe…or listening to me ! For the most part, I have benefited from the healthcare I’ve received over my lifetime but enough is enough. How can the system be made better? Begin by transitioning healthcare generalists (PCPs, Pediatricians, Family Doctors) from their current ‘front line’ positions to an ‘oversight’ role on the model of a radiologist. Most current PCP functions would now be the responsibility of a new uber-doc, AI Bot, MD, first in his class at Harvard Med. Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview, download my electronic health record, build my medical history, order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis along with any alternative diagnoses that ‘we can’t rule out’. Each diagnosis would come with a full complement of treatment options, including the ‘null option’, and prognoses for each. Only now, at this stage, would a human healthcare professional (PCP) review the data and evaluate Dr. Bot’s diagnoses and treatment options. In most instances, the PCP will sign off and Dr. Bot will proceed as planned, referring the patient to the appropriate facility and/or specialist for treatment. Occasionally, a PCP may feel the need to see a particular patient face-to-face; no problem, Dr. Bot will schedule the appointment. Or the patient may have questions. Dr. Bot is on call 24-7 as is a human telehealth back-up. Still not satisfied, the patient may always schedule a call or in person visit with their PCP at any time. Imagine if this system had been in place in time for my 2025 misstep ! So what have we accomplished? We have placed the patient back at the center of the healthcare process by providing information and treatment options every step of the way. Patient centric healthcare has reduced providers’ need to practice defensive medicine. Studies show that patients empowered with information and treatment options often do not choose the most invasive, or most expensive, course of care. We have reduced our need for MDs – a good thing since we have an acute shortage. We have empowered healthcare professionals to do what only they can do by eliminating myriad tasks that can be performed as well or better by someone or something else. This greater efficiency will allow us to better compensate healthcare professionals at all levels, thereby attracting more people to the healing professions. The need for legislation to protect the creators of AI software from malpractice liability may finally give us the boost we need to undertake overdue tort reform. Last but not least, we will improve the quality of patient care. Today, 20 – 30% of all the care delivered in the US is not appropriate given the patient’s actual condition. This startling statistic includes contributions from defensive medicine, false positives, misdiagnoses, overtreatment, and less often, actual medical malpractice. I think it is reasonable to think that we can reduce that rate by an order of magnitude, i.e. to 2 – 3%, with better use of AI Bots. Healthcare constitutes more than 15% of the US economy. To the extent that these expenditures are ineffective or even harmful, they represent a huge drain on GDP. Reducing waste by an order of magnitude, as I have proposed (above), would effectively pump 3-4% additional annual GDP into the national economy. The future is AI and, for all our sakes, it can’t come soon enough! *** Image: "The Doctor," oil on canvas by Luke Fildes, 1891. Located at the Tate Gallery in London. Share Previous Next

“The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.” < Back God is a Bother! David Cowles Jul 15, 2024 “The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.” I must reject the ‘God Hypothesis’. Fortunately, I live in a culture that is only too willing to help me do just that. I can take comfort in the fact that ‘nobody believes in God anymore’ anyway. Plus, the very idea that there is a God makes no sense. Where is he? Why doesn’t he step out of the shadows and show himself? And if he really is benevolent and omnipotent, how is it that the world is such a disaster? (I sound a lot like impatient Job, don’t I?) To protect ourselves against the concept of God, we have constructed an atheistic mythology that would have made the Greeks and the Vikings jealous. First, we accept the fact that we are mortal. You are not, then you are, then you aren’t again. What’s the matter with that? It’s true of everything, isn’t it? Yes, it does seem so…for everything outside me, everything in my ‘external world’, that is. This does not necessarily mean that it’s true of ‘me’, of my internal world. We define entities in our external world in terms of what they are. Sartre called it ‘ etre en soi ’, being in itself. A rose is a rose. It’s not a caterpillar. It’s not undifferentiated ground. It’s a figure; it’s a rose. ‘No rose → Rose → No rose’ is the cycle of life! And you? Well, you have no experience of ‘No you’…and you never will. What were things like for you before you were born? What do you think they’ll be like after you die? Hamlet notwithstanding, we have no a priori reason to imagine that the ‘afterlife’ will be any different from the ‘forelife’. For us, internally, there’s just ‘life’. We intuit a beginning and an end but we can have no experience of either. Your internal world is just you . For you, life just is. What you experience changes constantly, but you do not change at all…ever. You experience everything; but you, yourself, are not like anything you experience. You are the still point at the center of a circle. Relative to entities in the external world, you are nothing . Put differently, you exist in the eternal world ‘for others’ but not ‘for yourself’. Everything in your external world is what it is and is not what it is not. You, on the other hand, are not what you are and are what you are not. So what? Look, I had a life, on the whole, a good life. Why should I be afraid of death? Everything comes to be, everything perishes, I’m no different. Anyway, we’ll always have Paris. We sometimes wonder how the Greeks could have believed that a lecherous and incestuous extended family of gods, camped out on a mountain top, controlled the world’s affairs. Why wonder? We subscribe to a mythology that is every bit as fantastic – no, more so! The Greeks at least believed in ‘what is’. We are, gods are, things happen! Once our shadow (shade) has crossed the Styx, mythology, the 'maker of heaven and earth’ and ‘all things bright and beautiful’ - clearly, God, if he existed, could not be ignored. And that’s a spot of bother for us 21st century sophisticates. I am used to being the captain of my own ship. I fought with my parents for 18+ years just to secure my ‘right to self-determination’. I’m not about to surrender that to some invisible ‘spirit-in-the-sky’. We’re just getting revved up. We believe in ‘what is not’. Our mythology begins at the riverbank (Dante). So it all comes back to Paris. What else? It always does. Either we never had Paris, or we once had Paris, or we’ll always have Paris. Well, we certainly had Paris! How do I know? I remember it. But also, it has shaped all the subsequent events in my life, and it will continue to do so as long as there are ‘events’ in my life to shape. But what happens to Paris when I die? Well, of course, you couldn’t know this, but the city will levitate 250 feet into the air and begin to rotate…or it won’t. One thing for sure though, I won’t have Paris anymore because there will be no me to have anything, no me to remember anything, no me to be shaped by anything. When I am nothing, my experiences will necessarily be nothing too. Unless you think that my experiences somehow survive me…which would make you a budding theist. No offense! But since I no longer have Paris, I must conclude that I never had Paris. To assume without evidence that a phenomenon known as Paris somehow occupies space within The No Paris Continuum would violate Occam’s Razor. I have absolutely no warrant whatsoever to affirm the prior existence of something that has no current trace or consequence. I might as well believe, like some modern physicists, that the Universe hatched from ‘a goose egg’. To assert otherwise would be to posit the survival of some sort of ‘experiential self’ after the moment of physical death. If you go down that rabbit hole, I’ll have you reciting the Nicaean Creed before dinner. The reason most people do not believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative. Death cannot be understood as ‘turning out the lights’. The lights are ‘off’ only if there’s someone who remembers their being ‘on’. ‘Off/on’ implies that there is a light; if there’s no ‘off/on’ then there’s no light…and there is no Paris and there never was. In my view, such nihilism is a necessary corollary of a secular, atheistic world view. But in that case, non-existence is the best possible outcome. Actually, it’s the only possible outcome; right? Yes and no. As regards the external world – yes; as regards my internal world – uncertain. Prince Hamlet: “Ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…must give us pause.” We know the world, but we do not know that ‘undiscovered county’ beyond it. The world, as we think we know it, may or may not exist; God, as we think we know him, may or may not exist. But I am. I exist, and ‘I am’ is what is. (Descartes) According to Exodus 3:14, ‘I am’ is God (YHWH). That means I must be an image, a likeness or a reflection of God. But if there is no God, what then does it mean to be ‘I am’? According to this model, any sort of consciousness or self-awareness, however ubiquitous in the biosphere, could only be an accidental by-product of something more fundamental. If you’re not terrified right now, then you don’t understand what you’ve just read. Let’s get caught up. You exist. God and the world may or may not exist, but you exist. If there is no Providence, no God, the quality of that existence is entirely undeterminable. Concoct your worst terror; there’s no reason to believe that will not be your fate, eternally. Either there are eternal values and a benevolent God who embodies them and leaves his impress on the Universe…or there aren’t. If there aren’t, then Being is amoral, there are no objective values, and anything physically possible may happen, no matter how horrific. Surveying the world, there is every reason to believe that without God, things would be unremittingly horrific. Anything may happen and over time what may happen must happen. You have no protection, no avenue of appeal, no one to whom to plead your case. You are Job…without the Whirlwind. Kay sera, sera! – and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. What’s that you plead, “I am a good person. Surely this will not happen to me.” Yes, it will! You are not a ‘good person’, not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because in this Universe there is literally no such thing as Good …or bad; there just is! Good, bad; God, no God. It’s all the same. It all just is. Belief in God is not a choice; it’s a compulsion, a survival mechanism – a compulsion, of course, that can be overcome, but to do so is to accept an absolutely unbearable level of doubt and dread. Without God, no ‘good’ outcome is possible (because there’s no such thing as Good). In a universe where Good is at home, it is easy to recognize and perhaps contain Evil. But without Good… Theology is the study of what could be in a Universe that supports Value (Good). If the Universe does not support Value, there is no God and theology is without content. There is only what happens ; and that is pretty scary! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . purpose and devotion. Return to our 2024 Beach Read Share Previous Next Click here. 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< Back Dante and The Beatles David Cowles “If a world can or must…self-annihilate…then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist.” “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, England, none other than the world-famous Beatles, retraced his steps. In 1968, they released a modern, ostensibly secular version of Dante’s great epic, a movie called Yellow Submarine . Not that the Beatles necessarily knew that they were following in Dante’s footsteps – it probably never even crossed their minds. But inspired by intellectual and spiritual forces in their own lives, they ended up exploring many of the same themes that Dante had explored centuries earlier. After spending a night isolated in the dark wood, unable to escape, Dante meets Virgil: “Thou must take another road if thou wouldst escape from this savage place…and I shall be thy guide and lead thee hence.” ( Inferno , Canto I). The road Virgil has in mind is not through the spatio-temporal world of Tuscany but through a perpendicular world normally traveled only by the dead. Nor does he counsel flight. Instead, he leads Dante into and through the ‘belly of the beast’. “Abandon all hope, ye that enter here,” reads the sign posted over the gate of Hell. Once inside, Dante comes to the shore of Acheron, the river of death. The souls gathered on the bank, awaiting Charon’s transport, “blasphemed God and their parents, the humankind, the place, the time, and the seed of their begetting and of their birth;” and yet “they are eager to cross the river for divine justice so spurs them that fear turns to desire.” ( Inferno , Canto III) The souls in Hell no longer have the capacity for change. They cannot repent, and they cannot influence events in the spatio-temporal world. They are defined now by their sins, and they are compelled to live out those sins forever. The sign atop the gate also reads, “Divine power made me…and I endure eternally.” In Hell, all roads, all rungs, lead to Satan. As Dante and Virgil descend, Hell becomes colder and colder. At the very bottom, they find Satan encased in ice; here is the nadir of all being, a foretaste perhaps of the ‘heat death’ awaiting the cosmos. But this is not the end of Dante’s journey. He and Virgil walk on and discover that the direction of their motion has changed. They are no longer descending, they are starting the ascent of Mount Purgatory: “…without caring to have any rest, we climbed up…so far that I saw through a round opening some of the fair things that Heaven bears; and thence we came forth to see again the stars.” ( Inferno , Canto XXXIV) Dante’s Purgatory is very different from his Hell. Unlike Hell and Paradise, in many ways Purgatory is reminiscent of life on Earth, except that the souls there are immaterial: “O empty shades, except in semblance! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back to my own breast.” (Dante, Purgatorio , Canto II) Dante ascends Purgatory Mountain and at last crosses into Paradise. Dante’s Paradise is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, but it encompasses the entire universe. 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.” Let’s return now to England (c. 1968) and rejoin the Beatles as they prepare to embark on their own mystical journey. Trapped in the loneliness of Liverpool, Ringo meets the Beatles’ version of Virgil, Young Fred, the newly appointed Lord Admiral who has just escaped from Pepperland in a yellow submarine. Pepperland has succumbed to an attack by a race of giants (from Norse Mythology?) known as “Blue Meanies”. The idyllic tranquility of this land has been shattered, its population “bonked” into a state of suspended animation and the land itself laid waste (as in the Grail Legends?). The once rainbow-colored countryside is now monochrome gray, all music silent, dancers frozen in place. Just as Eden was lost but later regained, so Pepperland has been lost and now must be regained. Back in Liverpool, Ringo and Young Fred proceed through a gate of their own. The sign atop this gate reads “The Pier”, fitting because this will be the launch site for the Beatles’ journey to Pepperland. The Gate of Hell ushered Dante and Virgil into a land beyond imagination; so the Pier for the Beatles. We enter a long, narrow corridor with doors every few feet on either side. Behind each door some event is unfolding, some apparently from ‘real life’, others obviously not. Plus, whenever our travelers’ attention is distracted, the corridor itself comes alive with all sorts of fantastic creatures, some of whom we will meet later in the “Sea of Monsters." The journey to Pepperland runs through a series of “seas” (branes?) that challenge every preconception our travelers have regarding the nature of being. The first three seas deconstruct the phenomenal world into three basic elements: time, space, and objects or events. Each of these elements in turn will undergo its own deconstruction. First, the Sea of Time: “What time is it? …It’s time for time! …Look, the hands (of a clock) are slowing down…Maybe time’s gone on strike…” Here time flows at a variable rate…and it flows backwards as well as forwards. It is ‘time for time’. Therefore, it is the womb of all possible versions of time, not just the ho-hum 9 to 5 time (or 7 to 7 these days) that we experience in our everyday lives. “I don’t want to alarm you, but the years are going backwards. If we slip back through time at this rate, we’ll all disappear up out of our own existence,” Young Fred warns. To ‘disappear up out of our own existence’ is very different from what people normally call ‘dying’. If time is reversible (even just theoretically), then existence can be erased…retroactively. And since nothing can come from nothing (certain contemporary physicists notwithstanding), nothing is, ever was, or ever will be. If our existence can be erased (even theoretically), how can we claim to have ever ‘been’ at all? If my existence is not a settled matter of fact (“I am”), if it can be annulled at any time – and if it can be annulled, it will be annulled - then at best I enjoy a sort of ‘virtual existence’. John is undaunted. “Can’t we do something to the clock?… Move the hands forward, see what happens.” Outrageously, Yellow Submarine proposes that time is a function of the clocks that measure it, not the other way around as we had commonly supposed. Surprisingly, many 21st century cosmologists would agree. The second sea, the Sea of Science, deconstructs space, showing that it can be represented just as well in 2 dimensions as in 3. Yellow Submarine suggests that a specific dimensionality is not an essential element of spatial extension. As with time, human representations of space (Cartesian grids, Platonic solids) determine what space is. The Beatles’ insight has been confirmed by Black Hole physics, String Theory, etc. The third sea, the Sea of Monsters, deconstructs objects and events. It shows that what we accept as ‘normal’ is, in fact, a very limited and highly selective subset of all the combinations of structures and qualities that spacetime could contain…and does . Here, the Beatles anticipate Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life . Just before Yellow Submarine was released, Hugh Everett published his famous “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”. According to Everett, everything that can happen does happen, but we can only be aware of one string of events out of innumerable actual strings. A bit like blockchain. In the Sea of Monsters, all possible forms flourish. There is no distinction between organic structures and mechanical ones. Shape and form are indefinitely mutable. As in the seas of time and space, the stuff that appears to make up our world, i.e., objects and events, is an artifact of imagination. This third sea is aptly named. All the creatures in this sea are indeed ‘monsters’, not because of how they look or how they are made but because of how they behave. Without exception, they are involved in activity destructive to themselves and to others. These 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 outside the state of grace. Among the various monsters in this sea, one stands-out: the Vacuum Monster. As its name suggests, it is the nature of this creature to suck up everything it encounters. In this “monstrous sea”, every creature threatens other creatures, but the vacuum monster threatens them all…himself included. The vacuum monster is the Beatles’ version of Dante’s Satan, the agent of ‘nothingness’. Sure enough, the Vacuum Monster sucks up all the other monsters. Then, seeing that there are no other monsters to suck, it sucks up the fabric of spacetime. Finally, it sucks itself, tail first, “into oblivion…or even further”. Like the souls in Hell, the monsters in Yellow Submarine are compelled to act out destructive patterns, even when that activity dooms them, both individually and collectively. The first three seas en route to Pepperland closely resemble Dante’s Hell. Yellow Submarine suggests that all possible worlds must include an extensive continuum (e.g., spacetime) populated by actual entities (e.g., events), and it goes on to propose that any such world must necessarily be self-annihilating. Why? First, there is no inherent reason why processes in the ‘extensive continuum’, the medium of evolution, should not flow backwards as well as forwards, inwards as well as outwards (i.e., why space should not be curled up into a point like the ‘rolled up’ dimensions posited in some versions of String Theory.) Second, since the ‘actual entities’ are cannibalistic by nature, the incessant loom of combinations and permutations would inevitably give rise to a Vacuum Monster, a Satan, with the power to consume all things, itself included. Atomic scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, misquoted the Bhagavad Gita : “Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds." If a world can or must (‘can’ and ‘must’ both mean ‘will’) self-annihilate, retroactively as well as proactively, then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist. If being can be annihilated, it really isn’t ‘being’ at all, is it? Things can come and go but being itself either is…or isn’t. If being is actual, well then it is; but if it’s not…it’s not. According to this model, without some reference point beyond itself, it is inevitable that any possible world would annihilate itself; and if all possible worlds are doomed to self-annihilation, then no such world can possibly exist. Yellow Submarine begins ostensibly as a secular ontology, but it ultimately proves that no consistent secular ontology is possible, other than hardcore nihilism. Remember, Dante’s Hell is only possible because “Divine power made me…and I endure eternally.” The ontology of the Divine Comedy is not secular. The story of the Yellow Submarine builds on Dante’s insight and, as we shall see, forces the conclusion that all possible secular theories of Being are necessarily inconsistent; but back to our story… Of course, the Vacuum Monster does his worst, and predictably we are left with no time, no space, no anything. Like Dante, 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…and of our adventure...and of us. But not so! 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 Hell but, as Dante discovered, your very next step takes you in a different direction, up Mount Purgatory toward Paradise. Plus, it also turns out that Nowhere Land is not entirely empty after all. It is not a void. It is 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 (though I’ve been to worse), but not quite empty either. In Nowhere Land, there is a 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 destruction. JHB is pure information; but the information is so totally disorganized that it cannot know what it knows, and so it cannot be harnessed to do any ‘work’. It does not have the power to make a difference, so neither does Jeremy. If the criterion for existence is “a difference that makes a difference” (to misapply a phrase stolen from Gregory Bateson), then JHB does not exist in any true sense of the word. He is 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 the information they consume back into the cosmos. Jeremy is that information; in Hawking’s terms, he is the black hole’s “hair." 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 Hell and the creatures in the Sea of Monsters, Anaximander’s proto-beings avoid the allure of mutual self-destruction and decide, independently of one another , 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 Love. This is a decision that all of us in the living world have the opportunity to make every day. Every time we treat another as we would want to be treated, 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 Love in Hell, or in the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters. So, where does this totally selfless Love come from? What is its origin? In a universe powered by mutually assured destruction, the decision to let an adversary survive, risking your own doom in the process, is utterly ‘unnatural’. Therefore, it has to originate outside the ‘natural’ (spatio-temporal and material) world. The Love that drives the universe 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 needs someone (or something) to grant him reck and for him to grant reck to. Enter the Beatles! They choose to befriend the Nowhere Man: “Mr. Boob, you can come with us if you like.” “You mean you’d take a nowhere man?” “Come on, we’ll take you somewhere.” As a member of the crew, the Boob finds purpose and with that purpose, he begins to organize his information, so he can use it to ‘make a difference’…which, ultimately, he does. He becomes a full-fledged ‘person’ after all, a Pinocchio, a ‘real boy’. The Beatles and the Boob grant each other reck and, as Anaximander predicted, ontogenesis results! But to be born out of mutual reck, out of Love, is not to exist merely in the spatio-temporal, material realm; it is also to exist in an eternal realm. To be is necessarily to transcend the limitations of space, time and matter/energy. It is our thesis that a cosmos limited to space, time and materiality, i.e., a secular universe, could not exist. From Nowhere Land, the Beatles’ journey is now upwards toward Pepperland, just as Dante’s journey was upwards toward Paradise. Next stop: the “Foothills of the Headlands”. This is the land of disembodied thought. Its inhabitants desire to help the Beatles on their journey, but they cannot. Like Dante’s souls in Purgatory, these creatures are immaterial and powerless to bring their goals to fruition. After the Headlands comes the Sea of Holes. Here we pass into the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relations of figure and ground are reversed. The sea itself is the ground, and the holes in that ground constitute the figure. Nothingness has become concrete, so concrete that Ringo is actually able to put a ‘hole’ into his pocket. The topology of this sea is radically non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of directionality, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. But if the Sea of Holes is evidently 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 it is round (globally). In the words of the Paradiso, “The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.” Here, Yellow Submarine diverges slightly from the Divine Comedy . Dante has the experience of non-orientability when he is 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 directionality that is the trademark of non-orientable spaces. Passing through the Sea of Holes, the Beatles experience that same signature reversal of orientation. 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 connects to the Sea of Green. There are innumerable holes to choose from. Conceivably, one could spend ‘a lifetime plus’ searching for the one hole that connects with the Sea of Green, then 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 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 Sergeant Pepper’s band! They are Beatles under the aspect of spacetime, but 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. Their battle hymn: 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!” It is said that the fundamental question of philosophy is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The myriad answers proposed seem to fall into three categories: Chance. Being is an accident. There might just as well not be Being, but it just so happens that there is. Necessity. Being is a necessity. It is in the nature of Being that it must be . (Ontological Argument) Choice. Here one is reminded of the great words from Deuteronomy : “I set before you Life and Death…therefore choose Life.” (Deut. 30: 19) Dante and the souls in Paradise choose Life; so do the Beatles and the Boob. Choice is not the same thing as chance. Choice can only be motivated by values, and all value ultimately boils down to Love: All you need is Love! For Anaximander, Love is mutual ‘reck’; for the Beatles, that Love is embodied in music; for Dante, Love is Paradise itself, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” In his master work ( Process and Reality ), British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead combines these views. All values come from the “Primordial Nature of God”, i.e., God’s eternal valuations, outside of space and time; but those values in turn are only fully realized in the “Consequent Nature of God”, which includes spatio-temporal, material events. The Consequent Nature of God reconciles all things to each other and with God’s primordial values (I Cor. 15: 24 – 28). Welcome to Paradise! And a special thanks to Dante and the Beatles for showing us 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 . 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< Back Is 65 the New 45? David Cowles That’s conventional wisdom…and in this rare case, conventional wisdom is not wrong…but neither is it perfectly right. At 65, we do feel about the same as we did at 45…maybe a step slower on the basketball court, but otherwise pretty much the same. So, does that mean that 75 is now the new 55? No way! I’m not sure 75 is even the new 65. 75 might just be the new 75! So, what’s going on here? Gertrude Stein wrote, “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” Ms. Stein points out that subjective time is very different from objective time. Objectively, we age one year, every year. Subjectively, we don’t! Suppose I’m 65, objectively. According to conventional wisdom my subjective age is 45. But why 45? Why not 35 or 25 or even 15 or 5 for that matter? Ms. Stein anticipated this question…and answered it. At 65 I can be 55 or 45 or 35 or 25…because all of them are really ‘25’ (young men and young women). But 65 can’t be the new 15 or the new 5. Why? Because 15-year-olds are not 15, nor are 5-year-olds 5. Both are ‘25’ too: “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” How would you graph your age? As a straight line running at a 45 degree angle from birth (0,0) to death? That’s time all right, but it is objective time: y = x. However, subjectively, time is mostly a flat line segment, parallel to the x-axis, running from x = 25 to x = 65. From birth to 25 and from 65 on, subjective age follows a curvilinear track, convex before 25, concave after 65. Is it possible to do an equation for that? In the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine , John, Paul, George, and Ringo find themselves in ‘the sea of time’. Objectively, they regress to infancy and then advance to old age, all in the space of just a few minutes. But through it all they remain “young men”, i.e., circa 25. They live in ‘Stein-time’. To explore further the wisdom of the Yellow Submarine , stay tuned for Issue #1 of AT Magazine, scheduled for publication on 6/1/22, and check out the feature article, Science and the Yellow Submarine . Bookmark aletheiatoday.com . Society never tires of telling us to ‘act our age’. But which age? We are our own age only three times in our lives: once at birth (or before), once when the two temporal trajectories (subjective & objective) intersect, and finally at the moment of our death. Otherwise, our subjective age is always different from our objective age. How can I act my age if I don’t know how old I am? I’ve always admired children who could accept being children and old folks who could accept being old. Trouble is, I’ve met very few of either! I can’t remember a time when I thought of myself as a ‘child’. My childhood was an unbroken struggle to escape - escape from parents, escape from school, escape from childhood itself! I can’t remember a time when I did not want to be 25, and did not think of myself as 25, until now. I am 75, like it or not, and I’m starting to think of myself as 75, or close to it. My trajectories are converging…for the last time. Previous Next

< Back Life on Mars David Cowles “Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy.'" We estimate that Planet Earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. A mere 500 million years later, its first and only ever living molecule (DNA/RNA) concresced. Today, organisms descended from that one molecule cover nearly every inch of the planet and manage to survive, nay thrive, in unimaginably hostile environments. A single human body consists of 30 trillion of these resilient little critters. Planet Earth is infested, infested with life ! Like a ball of popcorn, soaked in honey and left lying out in the hot sun, we can no longer see the ball through the swarm of ‘beneficiaries’ covering it. “Its first and only ever ?” There is no evidence that life evolved more than once on Earth. Had it, its various forms would probably not have been compatible. Perhaps none of those forms would have survived. Best case, a single architectural design would have quickly won out (as it did?). Given the state of things on Planet Earth 4 billion years ago, it is natural to wonder how likely it was that a living cell would have emerged? But probability doesn’t enter-in to this discussion! It happened once, period. There’s no guarantee it will ever happen again; make the most of it! We’re left trying to construct a probability matrix based on a sample of one; can’t do it! Imagine you have never seen a deck of playing cards before. Your terrestrial life coach invites you to ‘pick a card, any card’, and you do. Ace of Clubs. Now, what’s the probability that the next card drawn will also be an Ace of Clubs? We know that the answer is 0. But we know that only because we know how the deck is constructed. Absent that information, the question itself is meaningless. Of course, once we start finding life forms ‘off-Earth’, it will be a whole different ball game, but that time is not now. Which means biogenesis on Earth (x) could be just shy of ‘infinitely likely’, or of ‘infinitely unlikely’, to have occurred. So all we can say about P(x) is that P(x) > 0 but < 1. Given that life has evolved only once on Earth in 4 billion years and, as far as we know, nowhere else in our solar system, it is impossible to assert that biogenesis (x) has any real probability at all: i.e. that P(x) є {R}. Sidebar #1 : If {R} > P(x) > 0, we can say that P(x) is hyperreal . While we cannot say that x is possible, we cannot say that x is impossible either. Is this the statistical model of agnosticism? Sidebar #2 : If {R} > P(x) > 0, is (x) the mathematical definition of a miracle? Given what we know (a lot) about conditions on Earth over the subsequent 4 billion years, how likely is it that such a life form would have survived ? Common sense says that if life only evolved once on Earth, it could easily have been wiped out early on, perhaps never to evolve again. Common sense also suggests that states-of-affairs will likely arise in the future that are incompatible with life as we know it today. So life then is suspended between ‘what is barely conceivable’ and ‘what is virtually certain’. It occupies the space between ‘not yet’ and ‘not still’. If so, then the bio-verse itself is a ‘logical dispensation’. It is a single fecund oasis perched above a giant sinkhole. It shouldn’t be…but it is! We can say that life on Earth did evolve, and we must anticipate its eventual extinction, so the only variable here is the time span. Time span is quantifiable but like all quantities, it is comparative. Is a liter a lot or a little? Neither? Both? Once you understand the terms, the question itself makes no sense. What then is the comparison between time and no time? What is the significance of ‘one’ in a universe already known to span at least 60 orders of magnitude? About all we can say, objectively speaking, about any ‘time span’ is that it is neither instantaneous nor eternal. A grandson once referred to a now deceased friend of ours (appropriately called Big John) as ‘giant’. Was John a speck of dust (“All we are is dust in the wind” - Kansas) or the Colossus of Rhodes? Both! Conditions on Earth vary. They vary by temperature and tempest, by the density and chemical composition of the atmosphere, and by the availability of water. Yet from the top of Mount Everest to the mouth of a thermal vent on the ocean floor, there is life. From arid desert to arctic glacier, there is life. ‘Give us any gas, we’ll breathe it’ – Laverne & Shirley. O₂? It’s a breeze. CO₂? A-OK. Terrestrial life has even evolved organisms that breathe methane! Once evolved, life is amazingly durable and adaptable. The tenacity of its survival contrasts with the fragility of its birth. Can’t live without it, can’t live with it, can’t kill it! The biosphere is omni-recursive . It gradually terraforms its physical environment to make it more bio-friendly: e.g. stone becomes soil. It experiments with innumerable distinct survival strategies, called species . Finally, it creates Artificial Realities (Culture, Society) that confer additional resilience via epigenetic adaptation. The existence of ‘life’ is extremely improbable but once here…it’s here to stay! Hypothesis : The conditions necessary for the emergence of a living molecule are much more stringent than the conditions necessary for its survival. Once life happens, it’s almost impossible to snuff it out. Of course, individually, we’re all only one stray bullet away from the boneyard and even as a species, we face eventual extinction. But as far as life per se is concerned, we’re not sure what it would take to kill it off. Consider Pando , the largest organism (by mass) on Earth. (It’s a tree!) It is at least 15,000 years old but none of its constituent organs (trunks) lives more than a few hundred years. That said, the conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago were anything but bio-conducive: Heavy asteroid bombardments, high levels of radiation, zero oxygen, superabundant methane. It’s hard to imagine that conditions on Mars, even today, are any less propitious for the emergence of life than that. Martian Bio-skeptics (that’s humans skeptical of life on Mars, not Martians skeptical of life on Earth) blame the planet’s sterility on its lack of heat, air, and water. But this argument is tired. We just flew 72 helicopter missions over the Martian surface. If the planet’s atmosphere is thick enough to support flight, it’s certainly sufficient to support some form of life. Even today, conditions on Mars are probably sufficient to support biogenesis, but if not, they certainly were at some time in the past. From what we know about life, it should have emerged and evolved on Mars at more or less the same time it did on Earth. We’re looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and I hope we find it – in my lifetime, please; but isn’t it much more likely that life would have emerged on our twin planet? Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy.'" David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Yuletide 2024 Previous Next