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< Back Grace Krzenski Young Writer Winner, Winter 2023 Grace Krzenski is a junior at Cabrini High School, New Orleans, where she enjoys studying science and English. Grace is on the varsity Cabrini basketball team, and in her spare time enjoys reading, playing basketball, and spending time with family and friends. She is looking forward to attending college somewhere in the southern states to study marine biology. Integrity vs. Life

< Back Christian Anarchism ”A heretical state is not a bad state…A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states. There are only states and pseudo-states.” David Cowles (The recent success of right-of-center, neo-Anarchist political movements around the world gives new urgency to this topic.) Christian Anarchism , an oxymoron if ever there was one, right? After all, Christianity is all about order – the order of the world that God created ( Genesis ). The Logos (ordering principle) through whom God creates the things of the world and redeems them. The hierarchy of the Church. The Decalogue and the rest of the 613 mandates of Torah . A second-grade classroom in a 1950’s parochial school with fifty pupils, one teacher, and ‘pin drop’ silence. That’s order; that’s Christianity! Right? So then, what’s with this so-called Christian Anarchism ? Obviously, anarchy has no place in ‘a Christian universe’… if you understand ‘anarchy’ as synonymous with chaos, disorder or even entropy itself. On the other hand, if you understand ‘anarchy’ as the lack of an externally imposed order (society’s exoskeleton), the situation gets a bit murkier. The lack of an externally imposed order does not preclude the spontaneous emergence of order (an endoskeleton); in fact, it requires it! Max Entropy is incompatible with Being itself. After all, God once and for all put an end to disorder at the moment of creation ( Genesis 1: 1-2). “The light shone in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” ( John 1: 5) Mikhail Bakunin, the ‘St. Paul of Anarchists’, underscored this point: “Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker…Each directs and is directed in his (sic) turn, therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and above all, voluntary authority, and subordination. ” ( God and State ) What of Torah , God’s law? Clearly, it is imposed on humanity, indeed on the universe, by a transcendent entity…right? Absolutely…and yet not so much! Torah is God’s law, but it emerges both from the will of God and from the human heart: ‘as above so below’ (the Star of David), ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Jewish tradition speaks of two Torahs – the Written Torah ( aka the Pentateuch ) and the Oral Torah, embedded in the laws of nature and in our hearts. The absolute genius of Judaism is contained in the ‘=’ sign it places between the two. God is Justice; man (sic) is just, at least potentially. There would be no such thing as a ‘just act’ in the absence of Divine Justice; but also, it is by ‘just acts’ that transcendent Divine Justice becomes immanent in the world of events. Perhaps then we should not be surprised after all to find the rudiments of Anarchism embedded in the Social Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. How so? After “render unto Caesar” there wouldn’t seem to have been much wiggle room. Plus, Thomas Aquinas himself affirmed that all are required to follow the validly enacted laws of their respective societies, regardless of the preferred political process du jour ; but Thomas added a crucial qualifier: Laws are valid only if they do not conflict with the will of God, which is Justice. Sidebar #1 : This is not theocracy per se . God is not a legislator, a politician, or a spin-doctor. Satan offered to place his entire global network at Jesus’s disposal…but Jesus declined. In fact, he did a full Sherman : “If nominated, I will not run; if elected I will not serve.” Was Jesus waiting for a better offer? From Raymond Reddington perhaps? God is Justice! Any validly enacted law is binding…but only so long as and to the extent that it is just! God does not dictate the color of traffic lights (red, yellow, green, et al.). Yet it makes sense to think that in general laws that promote traffic safety are consistent with God’s will. When Leo XIII became Pope (1878), he faced a crisis of social disintegration. Society seemed hopelessly divided by class, by nation, and by ideology. Karl Marx had thrown down the gauntlet 30 years earlier when he wrote: “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.” It was high time the Church responded…and, as we shall soon see, it did just that! Christian tradition supports the legitimacy of the State, but as defined by Samuel and David, not by Hitler and Stalin. The State as it occurs in history is not necessarily the state envisioned in Christian sociology. In our epoch, for instance, the very concept of State entails the subjugation of the individual to the collective. But this ‘collective’ does not develop organically out of freely formed interpersonal relations, a la Rousseau . Rather, it is an anti-logos imposed on all social interaction by a limited segment of the body politic. In contemporary political theory, the nation state is the ultimate sovereign entity (Hegel). It confers limited, subsidiary sovereignty on smaller political and social units, it recognizes (at its sole discretion) certain human and civil rights, it preserves certain ‘useful’ institutions (e.g., family, church), but it reserves the right to regulate the behavior of all individuals and groups according to its conception of the ‘general welfare’. The rather vague notion of ‘general welfare’ is given further structure by the Utilitarian meme: Greatest Good for the Greatest Number . That’s easy to measure, right? No problems there; and it works…provided you accept Edmund Lear’s axiom: “A collection of undefined terms, thrown together, can function as an objective metric.” According to such a ‘value system’, colonialism and imperialism are not only justified but mandated. War, slavery, and all manner of human exploitation can be ‘overlooked’ so long as it serves the State’s notion of ‘the greater good’. One person’s slavery may be justified if it provides others with exaggerated advantage. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. We are mid-way though Machiavelli’s 1000-year Reich. Machiavelli represents a pivot point in the Intellectual History of Europe. Like a funnel with two mouths and one neck, Machiavellianism inputs the wisdom of Ancient Greece and Medieval Rome, shrinks it down to the size of a city-state (Firenze), and then broadcasts it back out into the world under various guises: Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Liberalism, Socialism, Utilitarianism, Capitalism, Communism, Consumerism, etc. Riddle : Name 3 isms that are incompatible with Machiavellianism. Give up? Answer: Hasidism, Catholicism…and Anarchism. Sidebar : Utilitarianism (Mill et al.) sounds good and is accepted in some form by a majority of today’s political theorists. It is an algorithm with an infinite number of possible solutions. It includes solutions that distribute the total ‘good’ as equally as possible… as well as solutions where all ‘good’ is conferred on a single individual. On its very face, utilitarianism contradicts Catholic social teaching. It fetishizes the theoretical and ignores the concrete; it substitutes a mechanical algorithm for human charity and solidarity. It has Machiavelli’s grubby ink-stained fingerprints all over it. (Sorry, not a fan!) Anarchism, on the other hand, does not preclude the evolution of institutions of social order. On the contrary, it anticipates them; but the keyword here is ‘evolution’. Imposed order is not at all the same thing as organic order . Anarchism celebrates the fact that true order evolves naturally from the bottom up; but hierarchy certainly has a role to play in this process. The hierarchy is the vanguard. The priests marched at the head of Joshua’s column as it moved to ‘liberate’ the Promised Land. Hierarchy can jump start and guide process, but it cannot replace process. There are no just acts without God’s Justice, but God’s Justice is only operative in the world through just acts. What we call ‘liberalism’ (Locke, Mill, Rousseau, et al.) is merely an elaborate mask for the hierarchical State. Its ‘consent of the governed’ is an ‘origin myth’ that is contradicted by three facts: (1) the state of nature , presumed to pre-date that ‘consent’ never existed; (2) there is no definable process that could constitute ‘consent’ in the broad existential sense implied here (such consent would instantly create a new form of bondage which is a prime facie violation of human rights); (3) once consent has been given it is apparently binding on all generations to come: the sins of the father… The phenomenon of State, as it is today, is very different from the concept of state as it appears in Catholic doctrine. The ‘state’ of the encyclicals is merely the broadest, most general expression of community . Such a state recognizes voluntary human associations as embedded, necessarily, in the ecological order. Anarchism does not oppose order; au contraire , it liberates it so that we can celebrate it. The ability of human beings to form just and ordered communities is one of our species’ defining characteristics. Even Cain built cities! ‘Statists’ do not view order as natural. They understand society as essentially ‘fallen’ and therefore in need of an externally imposed standard of right conduct… as long as that standard does not come from God or Church. Anarchists deny this reasoning altogether. They view humans as God’s partners in the ordering process, not as luddites ‘hell bent’ on sabotaging any such order. To the statist, sovereignty rests at the most general level of association, the nation state, or now perhaps the so-called New World Order . The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity views the problem through the other end of the telescope. Sovereignty rests at the level of the individual and her proximate social networks (e.g., family). According to such a model, ‘consent of the governed’ is not ‘one and done’ but a perpetual process, happening, or not, every minute of every day. The consensus that Anarchism is inconsistent with Christianity looks a bit odd in the light of history. In fact, there have been two significant, long term, attempts to rebuild Western society according to Anarchist principles; both enjoyed considerable success, yet both have disappeared from the contemporary political landscape. Wonder why! After the Exodus, when the Hebrews emerged from the wilderness and marched on Jericho, they began a 250-year long social experiment. From the death of Moses to the coronation of Saul, society, guided by the grace of God and the precepts of Torah , functioned without a permanent political class and without any formal central government. Authority was vested in God, his people, and a series of charismatic judges (Joshua through the sons of Samuel) whose authority derived solely from the favor of God and the consent of the governed (e.g., a council of elders). The Exodus granted the Israelites a quasi-unique opportunity in history…a blessed do over . Unlike the Jacobins of 1789, the Hebrews wandering in the Widlerness had no Ancien Regime to erradicate. They did not inherit a bunch of old political structures in need of reform, and for the most part, they were free of foreign interference. They were given a chance to build a society, ab initio , from the bottom up…and they did just that, brilliantly. This lengthy period in Jewish history is recounted in three books of the Old Testament: Joshua , Judges , and the first 7 chapters of I Samuel . The final line of Judges summarizes the entire era: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his (sic) own eyes.” (21: 25) By all accounts, this early experiment in anarchism was quite successful. In our era, we are used to folks seeking to liberate themselves from physical bondage, cultural oppression, and political tyranny. Over the course of history, however, humans have just as often sought to trade their existential liberty for the promise, always empty, of security and prosperity. Erich Fromm explored this phenomenon in his book, Escape from Freedom . So did the author of I Samuel . The people cried out to Samuel, “Appoint a king over us, like the nations, to rule us…Give us a king to rule us.” Samuel, with God’s help, tried his best to talk the people out of their folly, but no cigar; and the rest, as they say, is History…brutal, brutal History. As James Joyce wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Now fast forward 1500 years: the Fall of Rome has once again created a political vacuum, this time in Europe. Armed with a trendy new ideology, Christianity , the people set about the creation of a new social order; call it Christendom . Once again, the operation was a huge success…but once again, the patient died. Feudalism was a dazzling display of decentralized economic power and political authority; it was Blockchain before Bitcoin: the Manor, the Abbey, the Village, the Cite, the Guild, and by all means least, the ‘island state’. This is not the place to recount the breath-taking achievements of the so-called Middle Ages. Suffice to point out just a few highlights: The ossified philosophy and theology of the late classical period gave way to new and vibrant ways of thinking. Van Gogh and Gaudi notwithstanding, Europe’s greatest treasures of art and architecture date from Middle Ages. The Middle Ages saw an evolution from slavery to serfdom to citizenship (only to be replaced later by colonialism, imperialism, and wage slavery). In 999, more people lived in Cordoba, Spain than live today in Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, or St. Louis…and they had sidewalks and street lamps. Some Dark Ages! Again, however, the ‘glory that was Rome’ proved too much of a lure. Christians abandoned their own rich culture in a vain attempt to resurrect a desiccated Classical Civilization that had peaked 1500 years earlier. Enter Leo XIII ( italics are mine in all that follows ): “ All public power must proceed from God, for God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception , must be subject to Him and serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely God, the sovereign ruler of all.” (ID #3, see below.) Separation of Church and State? Maybe. Separation of God and Society? Never! “Whatever be the nature of government, rulers must bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world and must set Him before themselves in the administration of the State.“ (ID #4) Is this not exactly how Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, Samuel, et al. governed Canaan for 250 years? “If the will of rulers is opposed to the will and the laws of God, they themselves exceed the bounds of their own authority and pervert justice; nor can their authority then be valid, which, when there is not justice, is null.” (D #15) “Civil laws…so long as they are just, derive from the law of nature their binding force (RN #11)… Laws bind only when they are in accordance with right reason and, hence , with the eternal law of God.” (RN #52) “Man (sic) precedes the state, and possesses, prior to the formation of any state, the right of providing for the sustenance of his body.” (RN #7) Jean Valjean ( Les Misérables ) was wrongly convicted! 100 years later, Pope John Paul II glossed Leo’s Rerum Novarum : “The right of association is a natural right of the human being, which therefore precedes his or her incorporation into political society.” (CA #7) “A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order.” (CA #48) Is that not Star Trek’s Prime Directive ? “By state we here understand…any government conformable in its institutions to right reason and natural law, and to…dictates of the divine wisdom.” (RN #32) Leo builds his concept of right order on three legs of a tripod: God’s law, natural law, and reason. Leo is not just jousting with heretical states. He is ‘disestablishing’ them! A heretical state is not a bad state in the way that a stubborn male child might be called, “a bad boy”, but still be a boy. A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states . There are only states and pseudo-states . Jesus began his ministry ( Luke 4:21) by proclaiming a Jubilee year (redistribution of all productive property); in the same way, Leo proclaimed the withering away of Europe’s nation states. Unlike Marx, Leo did not promise the dissolution of the heretical State; he dissolved it by fiat! No, not just by fiat, but by the application of Scripture. Finally, Leo quotes Aquinas: “Human law is only law by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and it is thus manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence .” (RN #52) D = Diuturnum , 1881 ID = Immortale Dei , 1885 RN = Rerum Novarum , 1891 CA = Centesimus Annus , 1991 Image: James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees (Malheur à vous, scribes et pharisiens), 1886-1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Image: 6 11/16 x 10 3/8 in. (17 x 26.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchased by public subscription, 00.159.209 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Groundhog Issue 2025 Previous Next

< Back Dr. Stuti Pardhe Contributor Dr. Stuti Pardhe is a dedicated professional with a broad spectrum of experience spanning social work, clinical therapy, and alternative modalities. With a profound commitment to mental and public health, she aspires to be a global Brand Ambassador and Role Model, leaving a positive impact on humanity. The Science Behind the 7-Second Rule

< Back Choices that Lead to Deception Magesh I often ponder over what drives individuals to opt for a deceitful path rather than a righteous one. Lately, I've been contemplating the divergent decisions people make in identical situations. I often ponder over what drives individuals to opt for a deceitful path rather than a righteous one. This article delves into the opportunities presented to me and those around me, focusing on how my faith guided me towards the right choices. As a musician, I've had the privilege of performing worldwide alongside multiple Grammy Award-winning artists. Throughout my years in the music industry, I've witnessed and encountered occurrences that some may only encounter through reading. While this industry teems with opportunities, it also harbors behaviors steeped in scandal. My steadfast relationship with God shielded me from the allure of drugs, alcohol, and other negative influences. In my earlier years as an up-and-coming musician, I received a call from a prominent nightclub owner, who owned the most sought-after spot in town. This establishment drew eager crowds every night to witness local and international bands. A sudden opportunity arose when the singer of a renowned band scheduled for a Sunday performance fell ill. They asked if my band could fill in for a 9 pm show the following night, offering us a generous fee of $700—an excellent start for a budding band. Upon arriving for the soundcheck, I was astonished to find a queue forming outside the club, hours before the show commenced. The club owner, as I set up my drums, remarked, 'I hope you're ready, kid!' The audience greeted us with cheers from the first note. They had come expecting the previously scheduled band but embraced our music, talent, and positive vibe. Perhaps our backstage group prayer played a role! At the night's end, when I approached the club owner for payment, I was met by his brother, as the owner had left due to illness. Reassuring me, he handed over a brown paper bag. Only upon reaching home did I realize it contained $5,000 instead of the agreed $700. A miscommunication had occurred—his assumption being that we were the established band. I immediately contacted my older bandmate, suggesting we return the excess. Recalling Corinthians 4:2, emphasizing faithfulness in entrusted matters, I recognized this as a test from God and resolved to pass. The following day, I returned to the club, acknowledging the mistake in payment. Astonished by my honesty, the owner not only corrected the error but also offered my band a regular spot every Tuesday for five years. Although keeping the money would have been easier, the long-term benefits of doing the right thing were immeasurable. Years later, I crossed paths with the bass player who initially suggested keeping the money. He confided in me that his dishonest actions had led to being 'blacklisted' by numerous recording studios and clubs. While he didn't elaborate, it was evident his dubious behavior had consequences. In 2005, while touring with a world-renowned pop star, our band encountered a scenario at a Sydney studio. We discovered a bag containing $7,000 left behind. Without hesitation, I declared that we must act honestly, quoting not only biblical teachings but also recognizing the value of integrity. One of the band members, a young man from the Middle East, commended my wisdom in prioritizing honesty. In jest, I attributed it to Corinthians 8:21, highlighting the significance of honesty in actions. Returning the money proved fortuitous as it belonged to an Italian immigrant, his life savings inadvertently left behind. My decisions to uphold honesty were profoundly influenced by the teachings I held dear. This integrity didn't just establish me as a talented musician but also as an upright individual. It fostered invaluable relationships with tour managers, club owners, and studio staff, underscoring that success in the music industry wasn't solely grounded in talent but also in honesty. Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

< 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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Where does artifical intelligence and Chat GPT fit into philosophy, theology, and science? Aletheia Today is the magazine for believers in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Inside Our Special AI Issue Philosophy Chatting With C.S. Lewis “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.” AI for Healthcare “Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?” Do Bots Know Beauty? “I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious." Neurotech Challenges Mental Privacy: New Human Rights? "Advances in neurotechnology do raise important privacy concerns. However, I believe these debates can overlook more fundamental threats to privacy." Theology ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Culture & The Arts Divine Connection or Digital Dalliance? "Prayer, for many, is more than just a laundry list of requests. It's a profound act of opening oneself to the divine, a dialogue between the mortal and the eternal." Wilber’s New Wife: A Theatre Odyssey©2023 "The evolution has begun, and I believe that the arts are going to be a very important partner for technology. Could this be the beginning of the next Golden Age? Absolutely." How ChatGPT Robs Students "When AI does our writing for us, we diminish opportunities to think out problems for ourselves." The Ease of Burden "Writing is not like Athena, springing fully formed from Zeus’ forehead. Writing is like all of Zeus’ other children, where he has to relate to someone for creation (and boy, does he relate). To create things, we need other people. It takes two to tango, two to make a child, and around 12 to make a sitcom." AI - Our New Frenemy AI and the Human Quest for Love AI - The Next Big Test of the Human Soul "The longing is powerful. Perhaps because this is the longing for unconditional love and acceptance with which every human being is born." AI and the Quest for Humanity’s Answers "AI will virtually obliterate the barrier between what can be known and what is known." Spirituality Call Me a Dinosaur, I Won’t Use ChatGPT "The fact of the matter is, we will never be like God, nor will we ever be able to create a system that knows everything, is capable of anything, and controls all things." The Trajectory of AI: Balancing Promise and Caution "Placing faith in AI to originate creations like art and music may lead to disillusionment. Ultimately, the true creator is a higher force." Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

“All gods are two faced…and that’s not blasphemy!” < Back Two-Faced God David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “All gods are two faced…and that’s not blasphemy!” Mythology is literally littered with two-faced gods: Janus (Roman), Duir (‘Thor’, Nordic), Hercules (Greek), Llyr (‘Lear’, Anglo-Saxon). Being two-faced, these gods function as time-binders. They look back on the past and forward to the future, simultaneously. That simultaneity is what we call the present . God is Presence and, therefore, Godhead is omnipresent. Two-faced gods are best thought of as ‘doors’: Duir (Old Norse) = Door (English). Hercules is the ‘doorkeeper of the gods’. These gods bind past and future in the present; but as ‘doors’ they also regulate the flow of ‘traffic’, i.e., of time. They set its pace, opening wide to allow the past to flow into the future, then closing a bit to slow down that flow and to prevent ‘regurgitation’, aka time travel. Think of the Godhead as a sophisticated grid of traffic lights, data driven to optimize the flow of traffic, moment-by-moment, in some major metropolis. NYC could sure benefit from a taste of the Divine…perhaps in more ways than one. Note : Christians especially should be comfortable with this metaphor. After all, Logos (Ancient Greek) = ‘grid’ (English). ‘Divine doors’ are usually portrayed as males, but they are very often partnered with goddesses who function as their ‘divine hinges’. Janus, for example, is associated with the goddess Cardea, aka Eurynome, aka Rhea (in Crete). Janus is the door through which the old must pass in order to become new; Cardea is the hinge that enables and regulates Janus. Conjecture : Perhaps, ab initio all gods are two - faced. It may be a defining characteristic of Godhead, and that’s not blasphemy! Even YHWH binds time: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” ( Exodus 3: 6) Today, much is made of the so-called masculinity of God. There is a persistent thirst to locate a feminine element in the divine. The ancients had that problem licked with their door-and-hinge model. Llyr (above) is the ‘Lear’ of Shakespearean fame, the father of Cordelia, a goddess in her own right. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cordelia buried Llyr at Leicester, a site sacred to the Roman god Janus (above), after Cordelia had obtained “the government of the Kingdom”. (Geoffrey writes happier endings than William.) Doors and hinges are inextricable. One cannot function without the other. Yet doors and hinges are very different from one another. The function of the door is to enclose, protect, defend; the function of the hinge is to open, to allow possibility to enter the world…but not chaos. The functions of the door require it to be in motion most of the time; the functions of the hinge require it to be immobile, all the time. This is an important reversal of typical Western ‘male dominance’. The hinge, immobile itself, is the source of all motion; timeless itself, it is the source of all time. Note : This reverses the scholastic’ ontological argument for the existence of God (i.e., if there is any ‘good’, then there must be something all Good.) Mythology says, “If anything is in motion, something else must be at rest. If anything is temporal, something else must be eternal.” (Perhaps a future ATM/TWS article will reconsider these arguments in light of Einstein’s Relativity…but that future is not now.) 20 th century Process Philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, often sites a single verse from a popular Anglican hymn as a summation of his work: “Abide in me, fast falls the eventide.” That work is focused on the paradoxical co-existence of permanence (hinge) and flux (door) in the phenomenal world. Modern cosmology accounts for the phenomenal world via a series of complementarities, like particles and waves or permanence and flux. Ancient mythology accounts for the world via its own version of complementarity, a door and a hinge. Either way, the concept of complementarity, supposedly a 20th century ‘discovery’, is seen to be alive and well and living the life of Zorba somewhere on the coast of the Mediterranean, several millennia before Whitehead. Doors move (“open, shut” as a one-year-old grandson never tired of saying); hinges enable doors to move while they themselves remain immobile. Hinges are the fixed points around which doors, and everything else, revolve. In Roman mythology, Janus (masculine, ‘the door’) is married to Jana (feminine, ‘the hinge’). According to Robert Graves ( The White Goddess ), these two rustic gods are actually countrified versions of Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera). Therefore, the very essence of mythological Godhead is to be two-faced, a door and a hinge. Janus and the other two-faced gods of mythology are often associated with the New Year. At the turn of each year, God looks back on the past and forward to the future, all at the same time, i.e. ‘in the present’. At the stroke of midnight, as the ball descends in Time Square, the past and the future are co-incident. In reality, though, every point in time is simultaneously a beginning and an end, or more broadly, the culmination of the past and the launch of the future. Today is not the first day of the rest of your life. This moment is! “Now and at the hour of our death,” means now is the hour of our death. Model : Universe is a google-size set of tiny, narrow necked ‘hourglasses’, each of which opens up to the entire past and the entire future of the Universe. To be is to be the neck of such an hourglass. To be is to be the entire Universe, experienced from a particular vantage point (the neck). God bridges the ontological gap between past and future and constitutes a single timeless, motionless moment ‘where & when’ the entire Universe, past and future, can just be present. God is Presence. So we are the image and likeness of God. We, too, bind time, we too create a present, we, too, prehend the entire Universe (past and future) in a single act of being. But we do so from one particular vantage point within Universe. God doesn’t know from points ! God prehends the Universe from the anti-vantage of being “all in all”. (Paul’s First Letter to Corinthians 15: 28) Again, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the wizard Merlin prophesied to King Vortigern, “After this, Janus shall never again have priests. His door will be shut and remain concealed in Ariadne’s crannies.” According to Graves, ‘after this’ refers to the coming of Christianity and ‘Ariadne’s crannies’ refer to the Corona Borealis , aka the ‘Castle of Arianrhod’, a small constellation in the northern sky. Presciently, Merlin saw Christianity as a threat to pagan traditions; but had he read more closely the Nicene Creed and the Gospel of John , Merlin might have understood that Christianity was really a restatement of his own core beliefs, albeit at a deeper level. Imagine how different the course of history might have been, if Merlin had been at the docks to welcome Augustine upon his arrival in England! In our map of the Universe, Earth and the firmament that surrounds it remain separated by a vast topological gulf. Our moon shots and deep space probes are feeble attempts, at least so far, to bridge the gap between terra firma and the stars. In this respect at least, earlier civilizations were way ahead of us. In Nordic mythology, for example, there is no essential discontinuity between ‘heaven and earth’. Sky begins where Earth leaves off. Their cosmos is radically continuous, so no special feat is required for Janus to play hide and seek among the stars. All the kids are doing it! We are tied to the notion of an ‘orientable’ Universe. Therefore, according to our model, earth and sky are as separate and distinct as the obverse and reverse sides of a strip of paper. Ancients understood that Universe is ‘non-orientable’. Earth and sky are simply opposite orientations on a single continuous surface. This explains why celestial forms (e.g. constellations) are thought to mirror terrestrial forms and why celestial events are believed to influence terrestrial counterparts. Turns out, our ‘strip of paper’ (above) has a twist in it; turns out, it’s a Möbius strip! Where earth ends, sky begins. Therefore, when the cult of Janus is banished from Earth, it naturally reappears as a celestial phenomenon. Hiding in the stars is better than wandering through Hades…though perhaps a bit chillier. In the ‘Castle of Arianrhod’ ( Aranrot ) there is a silver wheel, the mill on which the entire universe turns and at the center of which lies an immovable pivot, a hinge! Does this have anything to do with contemporary cosmology or theology? Only everything! According to the Standard Model of Cosmology, time is a vector that is infinitely, or almost infinitely, divisible. Therefore, any past is separated from any future by an infinitesimal point, which we mistakenly call ‘the present’. This model is sufficient to account for all most all physical phenomena, but it cannot account at all for the phenomenon of experience . Turns out, each of us is two faced . (If that comes as news to you, get out more!) Like Janus, we bind past and future in a real present, but unlike Janus, we also look outward at the world and inward at our experience of that world. We operate with a 2 nd set of coordinates: polar coordinates. We are aware of what is (outward), and we are also aware that we are aware (inward). We are Janus on steroids. We are not well represented by a mechanical model (door and hinge). Our experience requires something more organic. As such, we are best modeled as membrane , permeable to the flow of time but also resistant to it; that resistance is presence. Are we not forever trying to hold on to the present? Memory, language, and the arts (including architecture, sculpture, and photography) have evolved, physiologically and/or culturally, to help us conserve and savor what is (or what has just passed). Along the universal timeline, the present looks back on the past and forward to the future. Within the present, time does not exist. The present is an immobile pivot around which time itself revolves. Itself immobile, it enables all motion. Timeless, it is the source of time (time = motion). All of cosmic history hinges on this hinge. (See what I did there?) This two faced but ever constant Presence is what human beings for tens of thousands of years have called “God”. Without this God, nothing exists; nothing can exist. The past does not exist; it is past . The future does not exist; it is future . All that exists is the present and according to physics, the present is an infinitesimal point with zero informational content. Therefore, nothing can exist; but something does… As ‘two-faced’, God incorporates both the past and the future in the Present. As ‘door’, God provides the continuity that connects past and future. As ‘hinge’, God makes the Present possible, lifting what is out of the rushing river of perpetual perishing, aka time (lie quiet Heraclitus), and making it real. Or perhaps God is just auditioning to be a character (“Two Face”) in the next Dick Tracy movie. Image: Statue representing Janus Bifrons in the Vatican Museums. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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< Back Friedrich Nietzsche “Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.” David Cowles In the course of Western philosophy, one occasionally encounters a thinker whose work is so original that it is a stretch to locate it within any specific school or tradition. I have 3 such thinkers in mind (but of course there are others): Nicholas of Cusa (c. 1450), Friedrich Nietzsche (c. 1885), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (c. 1940) – three gentlemen with different backgrounds, writing in different epochs, utter a common admonition, best expressed by Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” These are the meaning police . 20 th century Analytic Philosophy rejected most of the Western philosophical tradition as being ‘meaningless nonsense’. Wittgenstein softened this assessment, relabeling it “ important nonsense”, but nonsense nonetheless. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas? All nonsense, most of the time. Oh philosophers, how painful it must be to learn that you’ve spent your lives studying the equivalent of Edward Lear literature! It’s so, but take heart, what may be ‘nonsense’ is at least ‘important nonsense’, and that modification makes all the difference. After all, the same could be said of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti – ‘nuff said! People have successfully poked holes in Cusa, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, but no one to my knowledge has successfully prosecuted a full-frontal assault on any one of them. Nor are they ever likely to. Their core positions are congruent with one another…and for my money, at least, virtually incontestable! Have you heard this one yet? A 15 th century priest, a 19 th century atheist, and a 20 th century academic walked into a bar… and they spent all afternoon together, drinking, laughing, and sharing ideas. From their relatively solitary perches, these three non-conformists are part of what I call ‘the conscience of Western philosophy’. They impose standards that every philosophical system should have to meet in order to be taken seriously. Think of them and their ilk as the ‘Greek chorus’ that accompanies Intellectual History. But like other such choruses, their warnings often go unheeded. “How dare you require my Truth to be meaningful!” So, moderns that we are, we ignore the warnings of conscience and go right ahead doing whatever it is that we wanted to do, or think, in the first place. We’ll talk nonsense if we want to, when we want to, and as much as we want to, and you can’t do anything to stop us! So there! Nicholas of Cusa instructs us that the most we can say about God is… absolutely nothing. Any declarative statement about God merely takes us deeper into error. The highest number on Cusa’s Truth Scale is zero. Wittgenstein instructs us that the most we can say about Metaphysics is… absolutely nothing. But we’re here to talk about Nietzsche! Nietzsche instructs us that the most we can say about Ethics is… (no surprise twist here) absolutely nothing. Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view, and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten, but let Nietzsche speak for himself: “What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be…it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality, purpose is lacking… “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) In this work, one of his last and written in the final year of his sanity (1888), Nietzsche ventures a summation of the views he articulated over the previous 16 years. In contrast to dualism, determinism, and materialism, Nietzsche offers a refreshing ontology based on the concept of “the whole”. In that sense, he anticipates by 50 years Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism and by 100 years the New Age concept of Gaia . All values are qualities, but not all qualities are values. According to Augustine et al., all qualities are good . To the extent that anything is not good, it is just deficient in some good quality. Criminals are not ‘bad’, they are just ‘insufficiently good’. All qualities are good, but most are not normative. To the extent that a quality is normative, it is a value . Take painting, for example. Red and blue are qualities. They are not normative; the artist may use either freely. Beauty is the operative value …and it is normative. The artist must strive for ‘beauty’ however she conceives it. Color is a choice (quality); beauty is a norm (value)! As Picasso once famously said, “If I don’t have red, I use blue;” the results speak for themselves. The Old Testament Book of Job , one of the earliest examples of philosophical literature in the West, is a 40 chapter exposition (in dramatic form) of the concept of values . In Job , values are normative…even for God! But not for Nietzsche! In fact, the very concept of ‘norms’ has fared badly over the most recent 150 years. Norm appears to conflict with Will and like two-year-olds the world over, we are all about our Will . The notion of ‘norms’ is incompatible with a ‘flat universe’ (speaking ontologically, not cosmologically). That’s a problem for us because a ‘flat universe’ is virtually synonymous with a ‘democratic universe’, and we are in love with the idea (if not the reality) of democracy . Norms only have a home in hierarchical universes, and we hate hierarchies of any sort: nobility, aristocracy, clergy, bureaucracy, umpires, one-percenters…you name it. But A can only be normative for B if A exists apart from B; otherwise, A is just part of the structure of B (i.e., not a value, not a norm). So, we can honor Cusa by remaining silent about God and we can honor Wittgenstein by remaining silent about Metaphysics. No problem, I’m more interested in football anyway! But to honor Nietzsche, we would need to remain silent about values…and that proves to be very difficult, if not impossible. Take Albert Camus , an important 20 th century author, for example. Camus begins his master philosophical reflection (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus , with a blistering attack on the concept of normative values. He is paying proper homage to Nietzsche; but then, about halfway through, he veers off: “I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation…” He rejects the free choice of mystics the world over (Taoists and Dominicans alike) who prefer a contemplative life to the hurly burly of the daily grind. But what gives Camus the right to reject anything? Effectively, he is imposing his own normative values: “…What counts is not the best living but the most living…value judgments are discarded…A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate…” Jaw dropping! Value judgments are discarded…unless they have to do with the quantity and variety of experiences. In place of the traditional values of Beauty, Truth and Justice, Camus substitutes Quantity and Variety. Quantity may be the new quality, but as a ‘value’ it is still normative. The 2 nd half of Sisyphus provides a litany of lifestyles that Camus judges to be consistent with a recognition of the Absurdity of Existence. Working backwards, who made Camus the arbiter of consistency ? On what does he base his assessments if not on transcendental values? Otherwise, we’re just dealing with his neurotic prejudices and bourgeoisie tastes. Sisyphus would then be reduced to a psychological monograph rather than a true work of philosophy. And who made Quantity and Variety normative, or what makes them so? According to Nietzsche, the source of such norms, like any norms, if they are real and truly normative (not just options), must be transcendent. Somehow, Camus misses, or ignores, this. Much as I admire Camus, and enjoy reading his work, it is clear to me that he is the very paradigm of Sartre’s bad faith . Camus himself sums it all up spectacularly: “For on the one hand, the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity of experiences.” Really? Someone wrote this? Do you ever suffer from insomnia? I find sometimes a good, heartfelt belly laugh helps me relax. So next time you’re tossing about, imagine Nietzsche’s reaction had he been able to read The Myth of Sisyphus. At first, he would have been ‘all puffed up’ – well, as puffed up as Nietzsche could ever get. “How gratifying to see that my work has had such an impact,” he might have thought. And then…OMG! (I can’t stop laughing just thinking about it. The expression on his face! Priceless.) Nor is Camus an outlier. It seems that bad faith runs in the community of philosophers. The French Existentialist Camus sells out Nietzsche; but at the other end of the ideological see-saw, A.J. Ayer, the English Logical Positivist, follows the exact same trek. First, he denies the reality of transcendental values and then he proposes his own such values, e.g. kindness . We appreciate kindness because we accept the reality of transcendental values, but what makes kindness normative for Ayer and his lot? Who says it’s better to be kind than not? Not everyone! Think Machiavelli, Sorel, even Stalin. So, what makes it so, Professor Ayer? So we honor Cusa and Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, but then we systematically ignore them. Our attitude toward ‘the conscience of Western philosophy’ is similar to the attitude of many professed Christians toward the teachings of the Church. For you, good; for me, not so much! 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 Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

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

< Back Psilocybin “If I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me?” David Cowles You first wondered about this when you were 12. Then you put it aside while you made your first million. Now you have some breathing room and can consider existential questions once again: “When we have what we call ‘an experience’ how much is that experience a reflection of what’s actually out there in the world, how much is refraction of the world based on our ‘intentions, projects and purposes’ in that world, and how much is a projection of our cerebral architecture onto that world?” You probably already suspect that it is a ‘little bit’ of all three and that’s likely true. But it leaves unanswered, “How little is a little?” In other words, what portion of our experience is reflected , what part refracted, what projected ? And how can we be sure which is which? Recent experiments with a hallucinogen known as ‘sillycybin’ have shed new light on this existential problem. Whenever crazy philosophy types (like me) persuade otherwise sensible people (like you) to think more deeply about the nature of experience, three aspects of experience seem to catch everyone’s attention: Events seem to occur in space, Events seem to occur in time, Events seem to be experienced from a unique perspective we call ‘the self’. Only academic philosophers waste time thinking about what it’s like to be ‘blue’, but most everyone at some time or other wonders about the nature of space, time, and self. The last time you got high on psychedelics, did you notice rectilinear, Cartesian space getting all gooey? “Professor, how am I supposed to measure things down to the fourth decimal if everything is continuously moving…and my ruler is some sort of squiggly snake?” And time? “How long have I been sitting on this beach? Did I just get here? Or have I been here all day? How to tell – check how sunburned I am. Ouch! That’s going to peel.” And who is this ‘I’ that’s been sitting on this beach all day? “I am the sand, the ocean waves, and the sunlight; I am the sparsely scattered sunbathers kindly sharing their beach with me. Where do I begin and end? What’s me and what’s not? And why am I channeling Walt Whitman?” On an ordinary Monday, the neurons in your brain fire in coordinated waves. You experience these waves as thoughts or perceptions. In our culture at least that experience is likely to include a spatial aspect and a temporal aspect and a sense of self. But come Friday, you have a date with some psilocybin . When we take hallucinogens, neurons desynchronize and some stop firing altogether. But at the same time, our neural networks become less distinct from one another: the boundaries between them blur. The walls of ‘the box’ just got thinner, so now it’s easier for us to think ‘outside’ it. Overall, the brain’s process becomes more chaotic while its output becomes more creative. As a result we may struggle to perform habitual tasks (like tying shoelaces) but we may also generate amazing new ideas and gain insights into seemingly intractable problems. This experience is also likely to challenge your everyday conception of space, time, and self. Note that the effects of psilocybin are a double edged sword. If we were high all day (like in the ‘60s), we would have neither the motivation nor the ability to get much done (like in the 60s). But if we never got high (like in the 50s), we’d sacrifice a lot of creativity… As is often the case with living organisms, the sweet spot is a happy medium. But how to make that happen? Hint : we didn’t have to wait for Timothy Leary; evolution takes care of us…though it takes its sweet time. The human genome evolved to include CYP2D6, a gene that allows our bodies to synthesize certain psychoactive substances, including psilocybin, naturally. Recent studies have shown that psilocybin enhances cognitive function . It would have sharpened early humans’ visual skills, supporting their hunting and gathering activities. The compound also could have boosted sexual stimulation, thereby increasing chances of mating, a boon to reproductive rates. Consequently, natural selection ensured that the ability to generate psilocybin would be hard wired in the human genome. So human beings get high naturally! Deal with it. Everyone’s microdosing on psilocybin all the time…or at least they could be. Even Grannie! But ‘some’ is never enough for us apex predators; we always want more! More money, more power, more drugs. Early hominids—our extinct ancestors—picked “magic mushrooms” as far back as six million years ago. Mushrooms originally evolved to produce psychoactive substances as a defense against pests and predators; humans repurposed them. Now those in the know rely on them for protection against cognitive pests and emotional predators. Among human cultures, there is an almost universal sense that there is more to this world than meets the eye . Nietzsche notwithstanding, something transcends the world as we perceive it. Call it Aletheia , noumena, dialectics, the Upside Down ( Stranger Things ), or God ( Torah ), there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Perhaps organically synthesized psilocybin gave our species its first look at the Transcendent. That would likely have spurred us to attempt even deeper raids on the ineffable. Shamanic practices and religious rituals, sometimes preceded by a ‘tiptoe through the tubers’, allow those who ingest the fungi to have experiences we would otherwise never know. Today, a well-attended church in Colorado Springs offers members of its contribution the option of a consuming magic mushroom before the services. This is another case of convergent evolution. Fungi evolved the ability to secrete psylocibin as a survival mechanism, humans did the same but for entirely different adaptive and reproductive advantages. Wanting more, early humans foraged for the precious caps, no doubt spreading spores far and wide in the process. Later, humans cultivated these same mushrooms and took steps to protect their habitats. Finally, hippies consumed them, ensuring a market and securing the funding needed to keep the cycle humming. So, if I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to 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. Share Previous Next

< Back Ethics and the Works of Mercy David Cowles Nov 7, 2023 “The Past is what it is, the Future will be what will be. We are just here, now!” Rule of thumb : Any 10 philosophers on the head of a pin = 18 different ethical systems! Most of us cling to a childhood confidence that ethics can be reduced to a series of commandments, a list of dos and don'ts, and the convergence of the 4 P’s: priest, parent, pedagogue , and police . Since 1500 CE, we have eagerly shifted our ethical focus away from the concrete act per se and onto the imputed ‘intentions’ behind the act (psychology) and/or its mythical ‘consequences’ (political science). “Act? What act?” The Future is nothing but a mirror image of the Past: New chairs, same deck! From Machiavelli (‘ends justify means’) to Mill (‘greatest good for the greatest number’) to Marx (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) to Malcolm (‘by any means necessary’), we have made a pact to suppress the Present (action) and amplify the Past (intention) and the Future (consequence). We have deceived ourselves into believing that modern pragmatism is a smooth continuation of an ethical heritage that traces back to Moses and Socrates. It’s not! Moses did not lead the Exodus because he wanted to experiment with a new social contract or because he dreamed of enjoying a more lavish lifestyle in the ‘Land of Milk and Honey’, Canaan. Moses did it because Liberation per se is an ethical imperative. As we’ll see (below), it is one of the Works of Mercy , albeit writ large. The ethics of Moses, Socrates, Jesus, and Marcus Aurelius are consistent with their cosmologies. Our ethics…not so much! Example: Chaos Theory renders any ‘consequence-based’ morality untenable. No event ‘causes’ any other event; therefore, no event is to blame for any other event. On the other hand, every event is responsible for itself; it is its own intention and its own consequence. According to the ‘standard model’, an Event is simply the Past acting through the Present to secure the Future (Darwin, Freud, Trotsky, Skinner, Derrida, et al.). I am the accidental battlefield on which various cosmic forces contend: Michael vs. Lucifer, God vs. Satan, Arjuna vs. his kinsmen. According to this ontology, ‘to do’ is active voice in form only; in fact, it can have only one voice: the passive voice. I am the passive product of my Past projecting its ‘image’ onto my Future. Our morality, therefore, contradicts our ontology. It requires us to take full responsibility for events over which we have no control and to shun all responsibility for events over which we have total control. We’ve stood the Serenity Prayer on its head: “God grant me the serenity to accept things I could have changed but didn’t, and the courage to change things that can’t be altered.” According to contemporary ethics, “the devil made me so it…or it was an accident; I inherited bad genes…or bad Karma; I grew up poor…or posh; I was abused…or neglected, and of course, I was under the influence of alcohol and drugs.” This contradiction is crystallized in the structure of most modern Indo-European languages: noun (subject) → verb (active voice) → noun (object). Past (noun) → Present (verb) → Future (noun). The active/passive voice is well suited to describe the transition from Past (subject) to Future (object): I dig a hole in the ground so that I can pour concrete. Most of us assume without reflection that this formula describes something that is a substructural feature of being itself: intention → action → consequence; I mean, how else could it be? Well, instead of Past (subject) → Present (verb) → Future (object), try Past (co-subject) → Present (verb) ← Future (co-subject) or Past (co-object) ← Present (verb) → Future (co-object). The difference appears subtle, but in fact, it is tectonic…to the extent that anything in philosophy can be ‘tectonic’. According to consensus, the contrast of Past and Future constitutes the Present. But according to our ‘alternative models’ (above), every Present determines its own Past and its own Future. It is easy to express an ethics based on intentions (Past) or consequences (Future), using active/passive verb forms. But how about an ethics divorced from any consideration of Past or Future, an ethics focused entirely on the Act per se , the Present? That would require an alternate voice: a Middle Voice , interactive and/or reflexive. Originally, Middle Voice may have been the dominant voice; today, it has disappeared or atrophied in most Indo-European languages. Now consider the Works of Mercy ! The first known reference to these Works, Corporal and Spiritual, comes from the theologian Pseudo-Isidore, a Frankish monk, writing around 550 CE. T he Works of Mercy focus on the material and spiritual needs of other creatures. They are consistent with the Great Commandment and the Golden Rule. They trace back to Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew, but they are also mentioned in the Old Testament (Isaiah and Tobit): Feed the hungry. Water the thirsty. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Visit the sick. Liberate captives. Bury the dead. Instruct the ignorant. Counsel the doubtful. Admonish sinners. Bear wrongs patiently. Forgive offenses. Comfort the sorrowful. Pray for the living and the dead. These ‘new commandments’ make no reference to Past or Future, only Present. In fact, what makes these Works ethically imperative is precisely that they are divorced from motives and consequences. They just are! A recent Thoughts While Shaving mentioned Michael Kelly’s Holy Moments . His ‘Holy Moments’ are moments of kindness, of being there for others. In other words, performing the Works of Mercy ! The Past consists of ‘settled matters of fact’ – we can’t do anything about it. The Future is indeterminate; we can’t control it. We can only control the Present, the moment, the act. The Past is what it is, the Future will be what will be. We are just here, now! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” < Back Miracles David Cowles Apr 1, 2025 “…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” We’ve got it all wrong. How unusual! Ok, not so unusual. Let’s start over: We’ve got it all wrong as usual ! When you’re 10 year old, beginning to question what you do and don’t believe, the miracle stories from the Bible and the lives of saints are a real stumbling block. At 10, God’s still in the mix but Santa no longer makes the cut. But what about miracles? The Red Sea parting. Jesus walking on water, curing the stick, ‘multiplying loaves and fishes’. Mary appearing at Fatima (and elsewhere). The sick inexplicable cured at Lourdes (and elsewhere). Of course, these are just the stories that made the nightly news. Every day, all around the world, people are attesting to ‘miracles’, most not camera ready. But what are we post-Enlightenment science aficionados to make of these alleged events? A bunch of people lying to make an ideological point? Fictional parables that have been mistaken for historical reporting? Symptoms of mass hallucination? Exaggerated or otherwise distorted accounts of everyday events? If you are a believer, the authenticity of such miracles may be a load bearing column of your faith; or miracles may support a faith based on a ‘personal encounter’ with the Transcendent; or miracles may be a slightly uncomfortable aspect of a faith deduced through reason. If not, you may believe that the Bible’s miracle stories are meant to be understood metaphorically: “It was as if the food supply had increased; it was as though Jesus had walked on water.” If you are a non-believer, the objective impossibility of most reported miracles may contribute to your skepticism. Finally, you may accept the validity of at least some so-called ‘miracles’, but you may chock them up to non-miraculous causes: The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a strong wind. The apparitions at Fatima were an optical illusion. The cures at Lourdes testify to the healing power of the human mind. But what if I were to tell you that all of these explanations are wrong …on both sides? Inspired by the positivist philosophers of the early 20 th century (e.g. Ayer, Wittgenstein, Austin), we normally sort events into three buckets: (1) the set of all events that can be reliably repeated at our discretion (scientific method), (2) the set of all events that may repeat but cannot be replicated on demand and (3) the set of all events that can never be repeated. The first set contains the propositions of empirical science. The second set concerns potentially recurring patterns. The third set consists of events that can (or will) never be repeated under any circumstances: Given certain standardized conditions, water will always boil at 100°C. The Boston Red Sox have won a few world series and may do so again, but neither wishing nor rooting can make it so. Humpty Dumpty can only fall off the wall once (since all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again). Would it surprise you to learn that our first two sets (above) are empty (ø)? The Universe consists entirely of events belonging to the third set. Sometimes two events are so similar that we’re tempted to use an ‘R word’ (repeat, reflect, recur, etc.). But similarity, no matter how close, is never identity. Regardless of resemblances, every event is unique; otherwise they would all be just one event. On one level, all events are congruent – they are all ‘event-shaped’, whatever that means; but on another level, no two events are ever the same. Consider the cells in your body. There are more than 30 trillion of them living at any one time. Enough? (BTW, the national debt of the United States is also 30 trillion…dollars.) They are all descended from a single cell, and they all have certain structures and processes in common, but no two cells are the same cell. Two cells may be of the same type, but no two cells are the same cell. Each cell is an independent organism, occupying a unique region of spacetime at a particular site in the body, performing a specific set of functions, enjoying (or not) a unique life trajectory. Outside the classroom ‘A = B’ if and only if A is B, in which case A and B are just two names for one event. “You call it corn; we call it maize.” There are no absolutely, positively repeatable events because… It is impossible ever to reproduce exactly the initial conditions of any experiment. No true event is ever entirely the product of its initial conditions; there must always be an element novelty - the sine qua non of Being. The initial conditions of any event are always the entire Universe of past events. Each event is a unique reaction of a unique antecedent Universe to itself. Every event automatically becomes part of the antecedent Universe of all future events. Therefore every event contributes novel conditions that ensure that no future event can ever duplicate any past (or present) event. (Is this an extension of Godel?) The Universe is a block chain . Every novel event adds to the chain, making it unique. Therefore, every event has a unique pre-history. No one ever steps in the same river twice (Heraclitus), not just because the river flows but because every ‘stepping in’ changes the river forever. Patterns that appear congruent are only congruent down to a certain level of detail. All events appear ‘congruent’ on one scale, but any two events can always be differentiated on another scale. The structure of the Universe is fractal . Everywhere and on every scale, it is self-similar. As your perspective broadens, the same patterns repeat. On the other hand, every iteration is slightly different from any other iteration on some scale. “There is nothing new under the Sun!” That’s the adult version of my children’s frequent complaint, “Mom, there’s nothing to do, I’m bored” to which my spouse would always reply, “Only boring people get bored.” She’s right, of course! How can anyone ever be bored when so much is happening all at once all the time and everything that happens happens only once? In fact, there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Everything that is, is new, always. Being and novelty are synonymous. How could they be otherwise? What claim to being would Y have if Y were identical to X. Y would simply be X…X would be, period! ‘Being Y’ would not be being at all. So where do so-called miracles fit in this picture? Nowhere…and everywhere. ‘Miracle’ is simply another name for ‘Event’. Every event is miraculous , i.e. unique – a novelty, the product of creativity, ultimately uncaused. An event may (or may not ) be predictable, but it can never be certain. Analyzing the apparent consistencies in the physical world (induction), we agree with Annie: there is a high probability that the Sun will come up tomorrow…but it’s not a certainty. Therefore, every sunrise is a miracle, exactly as the Ancients taught. Have you ever truly watched the sun rise? Then you know. Every sunrise is unique, every sunrise is a miracle. Arguing whether miracles are real is a colossal exercise in self-deception. Miracles are events so of course they’re real (unless your cosmology does not include ‘real events’). You object : It was a miracle that the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI, beating ‘the greatest show on turf’ but it was not a miracle that there was an Equinox on March 21 st . But these events are only apparently different: one was a ‘long shot’, one a ‘sure thing’, but neither was ultimately guaranteed . I wasn’t brave enough to bet on the 2001 – 02 Patriots, but I’m all in on the time of tomorrow’s sunrise; even so, it’s still a gamble. Miracles do not violate the Laws of Nature! How could they? The ‘Laws of Nature’ are just one way of conceptualizing what is . (Joyce’s Ulysses is another.) Every event is, and is not, the same as any other event. To the extent that one event appears to duplicate another, we call it natural . To the extent that it doesn’t, we call it novel . When an event is massively discontinuous with its predecessors, e.g. the Red Sea parting, we call it miraculous . But we are just putting labels on a continuum. It’s like the EM spectrum. It’s smooth but we call one part red and another part blue . In reality, it’s all just light . Every event is natural ; every event is novel ; every event is miraculous . For all their connotative differences, the three words are denotatively synonymous. Nor can we explain away ‘miracles’ by reducing them to safe, every day, non-miraculous, seemingly repeatable processes. Rather, the events we call ‘miracles’ are simply demonstrations of Nature’s creativity. They reveal aspects of nature we don’t often notice. Nature is not an inert stage set, suitable only as background for a Broadway blockbuster; nature is a force, an eruption, a physis . Nature does not merely ‘contain’ events. Nature lends its shape to events and is in turn shaped by them. Nature does not follow some pre-determined set of rules; it makes the rules. Whatever events occur, whenever and wherever – that’s nature ; we abstract patterns from those events and call those patterns, laws . Miracles do not occur outside the sphere of the possible; but they do live on the frontier. They encourage us to expand our sense of what’s possible, of what’s natural. They expose us to the transcendent power that is immanent everywhere in our material world. It’s a great mistake to imagine that Nature constrains variety. Rather, it is the rich top soil from which novelty continually sprouts. Nature is more than just the tiny subset of phenomena that can be approximated in a laboratory setting. Nature is what’s happening! Call it ‘miraculous’…or not, “It’s still rock and roll to me.” (Billy Joel) Image: Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Oil on canvas, 94.8 cm × 74.8 cm (37.3 in × 29.4 in). Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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