Not like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. Not a eureka-like moment of enlightenment. Not even a gradual awakening that lifts one out of sleep through semi-consciousness to full awareness that a new day has begun.

My understanding of the world in which I had so willingly immersed myself so gladly underwent a change I think may be best analogized to a change in a large rock formation that finally submits to an unrelenting powerful flow of water that pounds away at it and, over the course of 20 million years, wins out and transforms it by infinitely small gradations into a glorious new formation that draws us into a state of wonder that we rush to admire and take photographs of, rather like the Grand Canyon. No one who lives through those millions of years notices a thing until he at last recognizes the miracle that has happened.

So it was with me that ever so slowly I took stock of the fact that the ecological fantasy that had insidiously crept inside my soul was as bizarre as belief in God. Like those who believe in God, I had permitted myself to suppose it was essential for me in order to make sense of life itself. In short, I had allowed myself to be part of the cult that imagines all life is precious. I had joined the animal rights movement. All by itself that is innocent enough. But the movement morphed into a view that all living things called out for reverence, and I had gone along like a foot soldier who does not question why, for his is only to do and die. Dimly, I had perceived a few years after I had joined the movement that not all was well but I can hardly say I took notice. In fact, I took comfort in the idea that we were all part of NATURE. It was soothing to believe we were all first cousins to the birds, the bees and everything that breathes. One of the champions of our animal rights movement preached that all creatures great and small not only had the right not to be treated as mere things but they all valued their lives to the same extent that humans do. The lowliest worm had something he called “inherent value,” which he told us had to be distinguished from something else called “intrinsic value.” The doctrine was too complicated to dismiss as soft-headed mushiness. Moreover, as he taught, inherent value was not something that derived from any facts about the world but simply WAS. He was smart, much smarter than I, and I submitted to all this, and did not fight against it as a critical thinker ought to have, but swallowed it hook, line and sinker. In time, matters grew worse and I saw I was heading into the currents of a gigantic tsunami. The deep ecology movement had reared its head and soon enough the animal movement was just a small part of the whole. Deep Ecologists sermonized that All Nature Was ONE. If we were not first cousins to the most beautiful rock formations, we were at least their second cousins. Worse yet, we were second cousins only twice removed from the mud and the fecal matter that decayed within it. All nature was an organic whole. It was all too much for me and finally I rebelled. I screamed aloud at myself “I am not a second cousin to mud-covered feces, however far removed.” It was a madness that was not needed to make my existence meaningful. As part of my rebellion, I wrote a review of the leading book in the field of deep ecology and, in my usual smirky style, poked fun of it and denounced it as something no worthier of respect than the maddest religious cults that call for unswerving devotion to a leader who can, if he is in the mood, demand the sacrifice of their lives. [The review was translated into Italian and published in a journal that, as we may say, is all Italian to me, and, unfortunately, I did not retain a copy of it in the original English. I am not sure, but for those who want to try to find it, I believe the journal goes by the name of Etica.]

Still, I did not understand I was freeing myself of the whole animal rights movement. I thought I was renouncing only the extravagant and mystical idea that it had a spiritual basis. How could I dare do more than that? I not only had an intellectual commitment to the idea that all creatures were precious apart from their uses to worthwhile human ends, but I felt a moral commitment to that notion. I knew and was known to hundreds of people in the movement, perhaps thousands, and they would have denounced me as a Benedict Arnold had I said animal rights is just so much bunk. So I was still in chains. But I felt how onerous it was to sympathize with people who gave tender care to moths and lovingly transferred them from their pantries to their gardens. In time, I mocked them for their sentimentalism. In time, I felt estranged from those who said, “Okay, not moths, but at least you must admit the right of a butterfly to live out its life happily.”

So I moved in infinitely slight gradations from reverence for butterflies to respecting them. That took longer than you might imagine. It took longer yet before I abandoned the idea that the lion should not chase the wildebeest. I slowly developed the belief that there was a hierarchy in nature and that it was not wrong to think that humans, provided they did not ruthlessly exploit the rest of the animal kingdom for trivial purposes, sat at the very pinnacle of the animal world.

That is where I am today, forty years after it all began. I still believe that eating animals is a wrong – but not a very great one. Better one human should live than a thousand turkeys. Still, it is surely not part of a satisfactorily lived life that we ritually slaughter them for no better reason than to imitate the Pilgrims. Better too, to forego cheeseburgers when we can learn to enjoy, with a little bit of effort, tofuburgers. I continue to accept wholeheartedly Mahatma Gandhi’s wise saying that the way to judge a society is by the way it treats its animals. That does not imply they are our moral equals. They are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of fortune, chief of which are their encounters with us. I do not love them, not even the cuddliest of puppies. I do not embrace the idea that we should love all creatures; I do not even embrace the idea that we should love all humans. It is enough to treat all animals kindly and that we recognize that dominion over them does not grant us the right to use them as we feel like doing. If this be anthropomorphic sentimentalism, so be it. My awakening does not require I surrender that.

I want to know what makes a defender of Israel against Palestinians a person on the “right”? Is he also against affirmative action? Is he a member of the NRA? Does he support the “pro-life” point of view? Does he want to lower taxes on the super-rich? Is he strongly in favor of capital punishment? Is he a vegan and supporter of animal rights? Does he despise the “new curriculum” and want to throw out “The history of Africa” and return to the traditional western civilization courses? Does he want longer skirts for women? Do XXX movies make him sick? Does he suppose concern about global warming is just so much hooey?

Have John Boehner, Dick Armey, David Vitter, Sam Brownback, and Jim DeMint saturated themselves in the writings of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and Russell Kirk? Is that why they are “conservatives”?

Just asking, you know.

It is often but wrongly said that philosophy is the love of wisdom. To be sure, “philosophy” is the English conjunction of the Greek words that mean “love of” and “wisdom,” but to understand philosophy etymologically is surely a non-starter. Certainly, academic philosophers have no monopoly on the pursuit of wisdom, which, in any case, is a difficult and very contestable idea.

In all fields of knowledge, people are reflective, and so they are not satisfied merely to accumulate information. We may say, I think, that anybody who exercises his curiosity about the nature of things and the place of man in the greater scheme of life is philosophical. Plato said philosophy begins in wonder and that among the most important philosophical questions is wonder about the nature of philosophy itself. So it is no surprise that academic philosophers have put the subject “What is philosophy?” high on their list of topics to be examined.

Over a period of 2500 years, inevitably philosophy developed many specialties and this has been to the chagrin of the plain man, the man in the street, or what the English jurisprudential philosopher/lawyer, Lord Devlin, called “the man on the Clapham bus.” That means philosophy, as practiced by the academician, has become a very technical business, generally impenetrable to that man on the bus. In consequence, the man on the street goes back and forth between admiring the virtuosity of the technical philosopher and deriding him as a pompous ass who refuses to speak plainly. Sadly or not sadly, technical philosophy has an obscure language that is not a mask for exclusivity but is something that needs to be mastered by those who want to explore it.****

Even so, it is just wrong for academic philosophers to regard technical philosophy as the only kind of philosophy and to be contemptuous of the concerns of plain folk and to dismiss the search for old-fashioned wisdom with, “None of my concern.” Some philosophers say of people like Eric Hoffer, “Oh, he is just a sage, not a philosopher,” as if that is a bad thing to be. I do not know anything at all about Hoffer but I cannot see how that redounds to my credit as a so-called professional philosopher.

It may be useful, as a start on the quest for wisdom, to think about the idea of angst. The ordinary translation of it into “anxiety” is very wide of the mark. People who worry about where their next meal is coming from are not suffering from angst. Angst is really about a feeling of meaninglessness. People who are secular thinkers, just as much as those who are steeped in religion, want some sort of salvation. They may feel they are drowning in a world that is just a machine and they ask themselves what it’s all about. They wonder, “Why bother with anything if there is no life after death?” If they can get beyond repeating this refrain endlessly and undertake critical thinking, then they have made serious progress on the way to being a philosopher. I do not mean to imply that ultimate success is figuring out whether life is purposeful if death ends all. Perhaps nobody has figured that out but I assure you there has been good, solid thinking that advances beyond, “Oh, what’s the use? Everything is a mystery and one person’s amateur tackling of the topic is as good as any person’s painstaking reflections.” This is to throw in the towel at the ringing of the bell signifying the start of round one. And it is the height of vanity to suppose nobody knows anything.

In any case, for those who wish to think of themselves as philosophers, their salvation comes in the form of immersing themselves in study. That is the beginning of the way out of angst. No one needs a plush office at Harvard to do that. [Although I admit it sure makes it easier if somebody says, "Here is $140,000 for the year. Now go and think.] The advantage of being an academic philosopher is not that you make a small fortune but you get to pass on what you have managed to learn to young people and, if you are very lucky, you have also developed the skills necessary to teach them to think and how to think. [Those are different.] One who is an academic philosopher is a very lucky man or woman, indeed. Few professions are more gratifying when practiced well. For those who have only drifted into that world because they were looking for a job, angst is their inevitable doom. For those who not members of the “Professional Society,” I cannot think of any good reason why a certain portion of their time should not be spent on philosophy. Granted that the demands of making a living “in the real world” are very hard, indeed, but few of us live such sisyphean lives of intense labor that the only spare time we have must be spent bowling or watching TV to the exclusion of all else. Now, then, I have dispensed with as much wisdom as I have.

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**** As a very simple example of technical lingo, consider that logicians need to talk of existential and universal quantifiers. This talk is also useful for abbreviating what would otherwise involve long-winded explanations. Here is an example:

Consider the difference between “There is some number X that is such that it is larger that any other number whatsoever,” and “For any number whatsoever, there is some number X such that X is larger than it.” Only a moment’s pause assures you that the first is false and the second is true. The problem in case 1 is that the existential quantifier preceded the universal quantifier. Or consider that the sentence “There is some person X who, for any other person you can think of, X is in love with,” which almost surely is false. But “For any person you can think of, there is someone who loves that person.” We may fervently hope the latter is true. A person who says the first will be criticized succinctly by having it pointed out to him that his error was in putting the existential quantifier ahead of the universal one.

Many persons, upon seeing the above title of this post, will instantly think of Eleanor Roosevelt or Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir or Madame Curie, all of whom are among many legitimate contenders for the title. However, for me, the honor goes to Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist, who did more than anyone else to propagate the notions that (1) each of us is entitled to his own opinion and (2) the values of cultures are “relative,” and it is futile, silly and wrong to criticize alien societies.

Benedict’s book, “The Patterns of Culture” is actually a sophisticated study of different cultures but it has become best known for promoting the cliché “Everything is relative.” I don’t recall whether she ever said precisely that since it is at least 57 years ago that I read it, but something like that is not too distant from whatever it is she did say. Her book has been translated into 14 languages and has influenced – one might almost say, “mesmerized” -generations of high school teachers and college professors through whom millions of students have swallowed her ideas hook, line and sinker.

I cannot begin to estimate the number of students I have had who, after going on for a minute or so on politics, ethics, or art, finished up with “Well, that’s just my opinion,” intending to leave the impression that stating one’s opinion is all anyone can do. Often, too, they announced “Everything is relative,” and, in my wiseguy style, I too often responded, “Especially your aunts and uncles.”

The fact is that opinions and facts do not occupy separate realms of discourse because opinions are not expressions of tastes or values but are statements about what one takes to be facts. Thus, if I say, “In my opinion, Nixon was the worst president we ever had,” I am not expressing my hostility for the man but stating what I think is a fact, admitting it is not a settled one but controversial. Nevertheless, it is either true or false, however hard to determine. In other words, opinions are about facts, and if there was no fact to be resolved, there would be no opinion to state.

Despite the efforts of philosophy teachers who, almost to a man, are united in believing Benedict was wrong, generations of people swear allegiance to the idea that we cannot rationally criticize other cultures and, by extension, we cannot criticize the opinions of those within our own society who have opinions different from our own. In a word, they hold that all ethical and aesthetic ideas are SUBJECTIVE. Fighting against this belief is a losing battle, even a lost cause. It is rather like trying to persuade people there is no God. With regard to the latter, I am told by too many people that rational arguments are pointless and ineffectual because one’s view about God’s existence is entirely formed on the basis of personal experiences shaped either by dramatic epiphanies (i.e. the result of moments of revelation) or the consequence of one’s upbringing and environment. (It appears that one’s teachers do not form a part of that upbringing.) I find this sad and I hope it is untrue. With respect to our ideas about values, I think it is untrue. I do believe Ruth Benedict has more than a fair share of the blame. When my students arrive on campus, they are already spouting the doctrines that all values are relative to the culture one lives in and all opinions about morals are expressions of personal feelings. I do not think these twin ideas can be the result of epiphanies or of childhood rearing. Indeed, as for the latter, students begin life by being clones of their parents and like to say they learned right from wrong from their parents and their wise old grammas. It is only after they reach highschool that they are introduced to notions of relativism and subjectivity. Curiously, they fall in love with these ideas while still hanging fast to the idea that their parents were infallible guides to right and wrong. They don’t usually feel the dissonance.

Benedict’s book was published in 1934 and was, I think, an instant cause célebre but for the past 60 years, its ideas seem too obvious to dispute. I can only bemoan this state of affairs. As with God’s existence, to disagree is to spit into the wind.

Mrs. Cheryl Bereza Berryman wrote a comment on one of my recent posts. I do not remember her but she was a student of mine about 25 years ago. Cheryl says my course was a life-changing experience for her and she is very grateful to me. Naturally, I feel flattered but I am also puzzled and not entirely pleased. Over the years, other students have said kind words of the same sort, so, with some reluctance, I have to say I may have misled them.

In my humble opinion, a good professor does not need to be a dynamic presence. Too often, I tried to be a show: “Okay, boys and girls, for my next number I will spin 6 saucers and balance a baseball bat on my nose while simultaneously refuting the philosophies of Spinoza and Descartes.” For me, those guys were simply excuses to dazzle my audiences. The upshot of it was that the philosophers were neglected. I never took the trouble to prepare a single lecture before entering a classroom. I gave the students glitz rather than substance. Lots of razzmatazz, signifying nothing.

I can’t help wondering what Cheryl actually got out of the course. Could she tell me, if pressed to do so, one thing she actually came away knowing from that course? Maybe she can and, if so, I am happy for her and for myself.

So, to Cheryl and the others, I apologize. I think I fooled you and that is nothing to brag about.

Ny neighbors own some property in a NY suburb and decided to sell it. They called a realtor whom they had hired and asked, “How’s it going?”. He replied, “I’m working on it.” They had no clue as to what he meant.

My TV and internet connection both collapsed due to a storm. Days later I called the company for the fourth time, and someone told me, “We’re working on it.” I have no idea what that means.

The lights on the two lampposts in my driveway stopped working. I called the electric company that takes care of these things and was told “We’ll get right to work on it.” That was two weeks ago.

The University of Michigan promised to put JoEllen’s latest masterpiece into production with blinding speed because the head of the Press loved it so much. Every 4 months or so for the last two years, J calls to find out what is going on. As it happens, somebody always reassures her, “We’re working on it.”

Everyone of you has had that experience but I did something that made me a living legend. Ferdinand Schoeman, a hardworking, earnest philosopher, renowned more for being a nice guy than for his genius, died prematurely sometime in the early 1990s at age 47. In the spring of the year in which Ferdie died (or the following one – does it matter?) I got a phone call at 9 A.M.one day from a VIP of the American Philosophical Association:

VIP: Hi, Sid, this is…. Would you be willing to help us out? A few of us want to honor Ferdie for his accomplishments. We thought we should have a special session about his work at the next meeting of the APA. It’s an awful lot of work, I know, but would you take on the organizational details?

SG: Sure. What do you want me to do?

VIP: Really, all you need to do is line up 4 or 5 speakers for the event. We’ll arrange for the room and the day. Can you get back to me in, say, 2 or 3 months so that we have plenty of time to put an announcement in the Proceedings leading up to the meeting which, as you know, will be in late December.

SG: No problem.

At 10 A.M. I call the VIP: It’s done.

VIP (incredulously): What’s done? What do you mean?

SG: I’ve got the speakers, and they are all happy to be part of the program.

VIP: I’m flabbergasted. How did you do it?

SG: Well, I remembered the old saying, “Let your fingers do the walking” so I called a bunch of guys and they all accepted within 10 seconds or so. I spent another 2 seconds on the phone with chatter, “Great, See you at the Convention.”

Today, more than 15 years later, veteran members of the Association still speak of me with reverence and awe. “Do you remember the time Sid Gendin pulled out all the stops and arranged a program at the APA?” “You bet I do. What a guy.”

I think a plaque now hangs in the hallway of the entrance to the APA headquarters, commemorating my achievement. It says, “In appreciation of Sid Gendin. He worked on it.” The “it” itself is forgotten but I am immortalized.

According to the Shulkhan Arukh, which very observant Jews wrongly think is the authoritative code of law, people who are not Jews may assist Jews on Shabbes (Yiddish for Sabbath) with certain tasks that Jews are forbidden to do for themselves. According to the great 16th century rabbi, Joe Karo – known widely among the adulators as Yosef Karo) there are principles of divorce, finance, religious conversion, eating, breathing – you name it, Joe wrote about it – that apply only to Jews and not the heathen (i.e. YOU). It took Joe 20 years to create his masterpiece.

A goy is a nonJew. (You.) Actually, if you grew up in an all-Jewish world, you know the word is not a neutral descriptor but also a word of contempt, just as shiksa does not merely mean “non-Jewish girl” but marks her as an abomination.

Joe got it all wrong because, expert though he was on religious matters, he was a rotten philosopher. There are some simple rules of clear thinking that Joe was not privy to: (1) the rule of universalization and (2) the rule of reversibility. These two pretty much collapse into one rule but we won’t worry about niceties.

Fundamentally, (1) says “What is right for one person is right for all in relevantly similar circumstances.” And only a dirty rat fink would say “Yeah, but being of a different religion changes things.” Sure, you are entitled to a bigger portion of food than that little girl if you are 7′ and weigh 350 pounds while she stands only 3’10″ and weighs 45 pounds. Do we really have to explain that? Is that philosophy or common sense?

The trouble with being of a different religion than a Jew is that you are already off to a bad start. Jews don’t preach “We all worship God in our own ways.” In fact, only a schmuck believes that. You either have got it right or you don’t. So, if you have got it wrong that doesn’t excuse you from trying to get it right. CONVERT for God’s sake. And for your own.

If Jews have to do certain things on Saturday, so do you. Don’t think that by switching to Sunday, God will forgive you. Don’t think you can eat a chunk of a dead pig because you are not a Yid. Get it through your head – nobody can eat bits and pieces of a pig corpse. Don’t say, “But I am not Jewish and I don’t accept that.” Believe me, I will be watching you burn in hell with my telescopic lens when I get to that place with great views.

When those morons on Chester Street in Brownsville Brooklyn said to me, “Boychekel, come in for a moment and put out the lights.” they were condemning themselves, not me, because as a 10-year old boy I was merely the instrument of their disgusting tricks. And if there was a non-Jew in the neighborhood (there weren’t any, of course) and these sneaks had asked him to put out the lights (“Why make Edison rich?” was the going stupidity of that time) then only by twisted Talmudic reasoning or appeal to Joe Karo’s great guide, “How to sneak around the law” could these black-coated lunatics have fooled themselves into thinking, “Hey, am I smart or what?”

What the dopes with long sideburns did not understand was that if it was okay for me to put out the lights then it was okay for them, too. If not okay for them then not okay for me. If it was not okay for them to do it, they’ll burn in hell, I promise you, for inveigling a 10-year old boy into doing what they would not dream of asking their own sons to do. Why me, not their sons? Simple. As a rotten fall-from-grace Jew, I was worse than a goy. There is nothing more despicable than a fall-from-grace Jew. Muslims have me beat hands down. The evil Muslims do is only a consequence of their incredible stupidity but a fall-from-grace Jew makes a deliberate rejection of The Holy One.

Joe Karo is one of the main culprits of Judaic evil and I am betting my bottom dollar that his unkosher innards have long ago burnt away to ashes.

There was much wrong with my post the other day on how to create a universe. I rightly received some harsh, privately communicated criticisms. One I reject altogether. It was that I have worked this theme to death. I don’t think I have but, however I often I return to it, I won’t apologize because it is great fun for me.

Another problem is that my post was pompous, obscure and wiseguyish. The dialogue form only contributed to all three defects. I accept all three of these criticisms. So I want to try again. To those who find this tedious, I offer a quasi-apology and simply say no one is required to read it. That’s enough.

Let me lay my cards on the table although I am not sure it is necessary. I am a flat-out atheist and have been that since before I was a teenager. The problem of God’s existence is deep. Those who reject God’s existence on the grounds that the evidence for his existence is slim to none are making a big mistake. The trouble is that conceptual difficulties make the idea of God impossible. I do not refer to the biblical notion of God according to which he is a person, like us, only much better. On this sophomoric crudity, we are made in his image. Simply scan the skies with a Hubble telescope and you should, if you are not a dogmatist, soon be convinced there is no such man and no place called heaven. I adamantly refuse to argue for that. In my own way, I, too, am a dogmatist.

Philosophers and theologians are another matter. They say God is omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, all-perfect in his goodness and that he created the world ex nihilo, by which they mean out of nothing. He did not find a void and proceeded to fill it up. Literally, there was nothing, not even a void.
Atheist philosophers have hammered away at this idea, claiming – rightly in my view – that it is incoherent babble. They ask, “What was he doing before he created the universe and where was he? Fair questions, indeed. For this reason, they say it is absurd to look for empirical evidence for his existence or his nonexistence. You might as well look for evidence that the square root of 3 eats fire-shovels for breakfast. That means nothing. Thus, atheist philosophers like to say they reject atheism as they do theism for they can make no sense of either doctrine. I am very sympatico to this reasoning. You have to come up, not with evidence one way or the other but conceptual arguments for your opinion. Again, I agree.

All that being said, I have had a long-standing interest in the idea of omnipotence taken by itself, distinct from the problems of omniscience and eternality, and have even written on it in a published essay in a theological journal. That was about 35 to 40 years ago, and I can’t remember what I wrote, which is good, because it allows me to make a fresh start.

I believe all atheist philosophers have gone wrong. They take the idea of omnipotence for granted and proceed to show the difficulties it gives rise to. A favorite ploy is to show it is contradictory. The paradox of the stone is a favorite weapon. Briefly, it is this: If God is all-powerful then he should be able to make any gigantic stone too difficult to lift. But since he is all-powerful, he should also be able to lift it. So which is it? You can’t have it both ways so the notion of omnipotence is self-contradictory. I did try to resolve that one in my early essay but I have no appetite for that any longer.

I want to raise another issue. It is that God does not know how he does things. It is important to see that we should not start out with the assumption of omnipotence. That idea suggests that God is like us but more able. That idea suggests that God could tell us how he does things. In truth, he cannot. God is not skillful nor loaded with abilities. He does not create in virtue of something or other. That is only how we work. We have skills and abilities and, in principle, we can explain them to someone who doesn’t have them. Skills can be taught. If you have the right make-up, you can do what others do via practice and patience. God is not like that. Abilities and skills are, for main part, acquired, but God does not acquire his. He just has POWER. Power is primitive.

Because power is primitive, there is nothing to explain. God says, “Let the world be” and sure enough it comes to be. That’s an end to the matter. To the query, “How did you do that?” he has only one answer: “I don’t know. When I say ‘Let the world be’ it happens. If you say it, nothing happens.” You could say God is lucky and we are not. Whatever God wants to happen, happens in virtue of nothing more than his willing it. That is an extraordinary thing. We can’t call it a gift because gifts are bestowed by one individual upon another. God does not do anything in virtue of his omnipotence. That puts the cart before the horse. His omnipotence simply is a summary statement of the fact that he can do anything. Calling him omnipotent as a way to explain his actions is wrongly to think he uses his powers as means to his deeds. That is the great blunder of all philosophers and theologians alike. God is not a skilled worker. To build a universe he does not, as I said last time, go out and buy a set of tools at Ace Hardware and settle down to six days of work. The metaphor of six days is just that – a metaphor. He does not rest on the 7th day because he does not need rest. I won’t worry about the many crazy contradictions in the biblical idea of six days followed by rest.

So, is it true that God is omnipotent in the sense that I understand the term? I believe there is no other way to think of him without reducing him to a hardworking guy. That idea simply sets him up as an alternative to scientific explanations concerning the origin of the universe. If anybody thinks that, he is welcome to it. In saying, as I do, that nothing can explain God’s omnipotence and that includes God himself, I do not mean he exists. He doesn’t, period. There are many problems about God but I hope I have enumerated one, to wit, that the god of philosophy and theology posits something inconceivable: an inexplicable power that defies God’s understanding. That is no small accomplishment and is my chief contribution to theology. For those, like the estimable atheist, Ted Drange, who says, “I can conceive it but it is false” I can only say to him that he is wrong. I will leave it at that.

I have always been curious as to how one creates a universe ex nihilo, and at last, not content with the answers I received from theologians, I decided to go directly to The Source, The Prime Mover, The First Cause, the Big Guy in the Sky, (and all that jazz), to get a straight answer.

SG: Sir, how do I address you? After all, your title is so long and clumsy.
Most Adored and Noble One, Worthy of Adulation and Reverence: You may call me MANOWAR so long as you don’t confuse me with the great steed, Man O’ War.
SG: I promise not to.
MANOWAR: Proceed. In que manera, peudo sirvele?
SG: Impressive.
MANOWAR: A bit of showing off. Yet, I suppose you already know that I know all languages including a few hundred I keep to myself.
SG: Why do you keep them to yourself?
MANOWAR: Just my fun way of refuting Wittgenstein who said it is impossible for any language to be private. Let’s get on with it.
SG: I want to know how to create a universe.
MANOWAR: Perfectly reasonable. But as Rome was not built in a day (of course I could have done it in 2-3 attoseconds), the explanation will be long. Do you have the time? The explanation involves lots of philosophy. Does that discourage you?
SG: Not at all. I will take down all you say and publish it in my blog. I have my #2 pencil. I’m ready.
MANOWAR: To begin, I must explain what it is to have a skill. Pay close attention. Skills are acquired. Take that gentleman standing nearby. He does wonderful sleight-of-hand tricks. That’s a skill I heartily love. You cannot ever do what he is doing because your fingers are short and stubby. Moreover, his fingers have a certain flexibility. He can rest one finger directly on top of an adjacent one. Can you do that?
SG: Only if I hold the finger down with my other hand.
MANOWAR: So he is off to a good start. Next, someone showed him how to position the coins he so nimbly transfers from one finger to the next, unaided by other fingers. He had to be shown that. He was taught. Then, he practiced. At first, he did that trick clumsily but he kept at it for 2 hours per day 7 days per week for 2 years. Today, he needs only to practice 2 hours each week to maintain his level of skill. Generally speaking, once you reach a very high level of competence, you can ease off on how much you need to practice. Not in all cases, however. We won’t bother with the differences.
SG: If I understand you, skills are democratic. If one person with the right physical attributes can do do X, anyone else with the same physical attributes can also learn to do X.
MANOWAR: Precisely. Calling skills democratice is a lovely way to describe them.
SG: What about abilities?
MANOWAR: I’m getting to that. Consider Mr. Usain Bolt, the fastest man who ever lived. In virtue of certain physical endowments that are uncommon, he has an extraordinary ability. His friend, Mr. Robles, is a great hurdler. That, too, requires great ability to run but hurdling at the high level of his competence is a skill. Mr. Bolt practices, to be sure, but it does not mean much except to separate him from hundreds of others who otherwise would be nearly as good as he is. He does not have to be shown how to run fast. It would be silly for his coach to remind him to move his legs quickly. His coach simply watches to make sure he practices to ensure his ability does not decline. Mr. Robles was shown proper technique and he rehearses regularly under the watchful eye of his coach. We must not confuse ability with skill.
SG: I promise I won’t. What else?
MANOWAR: There is something called capability and what is much like it, capacity. Abilities do not exist in a vacuum. The woman sitting in the corner once had wonderful ability to run fast but she had an accident and lost her legs. You can, speaking loosely, say she has lost her ability to run but I prefer to say she now lacks the capability to exercise the ability that she once so proudly had. I feel sorry for her.
SG: Can’t you restore her to her former greatness?
MANOWAR: I prefer not to. To explain why would take us into the realm of theology and we are doing philosophy. Don’t ask again or we are done. Now, capabilities or, if you prefer, capacities, are things you mortals have not become very familiar with. I have great faith in human physiologists and expect that in about August, 2025, they will have solved all the mysteries (to them, not me, of course) of the workings of the human body.
SG: You expect? Don’t you know?
MANOWAR: Don’t play games with me. You are trying to tempt me to resolve the deep conunundrum revolving around the relationship of my omniscience and your free will. Perhaps we’ll get to that another time. Now, then, where were we?
SG: You don’t know?
MANOWAR: You are a wise guy and I see why you are not one of the 17 most lovable people on your planet. Yes, I do know where we were. Now, I resume. According to your greatest ever philosopher, the dead Scotsman, David Hume, causality is nothing other than the regular conjunction of events. You bang on a piece of wood and that emits a noise. It happens so regularly that you just come to expect the noise. There is nothing more to it than that. Of course, this is wrong, and childishly so. The banging has the power to produce the noise. Only philosophers don’t know that. We may say, to coin an expression, POWER IS WHERE IT’S AT. I have unlimited power, and that stands me in good stead – most of the time. I only get peeved when philosophers try to prove I don’t have unlimited power by means of their silly semantic tricks. They want to know if I can lift any stone I make and if I can make a stone so heavy that even I can’t lift it. They think I am trapped in a contradiction. For their troubles, I banish them to Dante’s inferno. If I get real mad, I ship them straight to Gehenna. Look it up on the internet.
SG: Now, it is power that I think is the key to understanding creation. Right?
MANOWAR: Right. Power is a quantum leap up from capability. It is a thing unto itself. It is the inexplicable “Je ne sais quoi,” an expression so dear to all those who are high school graduates. In plain words, power is primitive. I have it; you don’t.
SG: Give me an example.
MANOWAR: I’ll give you the best. When I say, “Let the world be” it is. That is all there is to it. When I say it, it happens. When you say it, nothing happens.
SG: I am envious and worse, I don’t understand.
MANOWAR: There is nothing to understand. It is a raw feature of the universe. It is not a skill I have. I cannot teach it to you. You will never create your own universe ex nihilo. That is, no matter how you try, you can’t build a universe out of nothing, as I did. Now, we come to the important part. I don’t do anything other than say “Let it be” for it to happen. If I had to do something, it would not be power but only ability or skill or something like that. I did not go to Ace Hardware and buy a set of Black and Decker tools. I did not spend a lot of time mapping it all out. If I had made the world by utilizing skills or abilities, then, in principle, I could teach you to do the same. I can’t do that. Do not think of that as a limit to my powers.
SG: I am beginning to grasp the immensity of it all. In virtue of your power, you, yourself, haven’t a clue as to how you created the universe.
MANOWAR: Not exactly. It is true you can say, “He doesn’t know how he did it” but that is diminishing me. I take myself as I am. I am unique. That I plainly see and therefore understand. You might say I am lucky. I create in virtue of nothing. Again, no skills are employed. I don’t need them.
SG: So to be God is to be lucky. And luck itself is primitive.
MANOWAR: Exactamenté, You are beginning to catch on. There is a fundamental egalitarianism between us that is deeply embedded in the structure of the world just as logic is. As philosophers have told you, a thing cannot both exist and not exist at the same time in the same sense of the term. Nothing I could have done about that. Likewise, our understanding of how I do things is on an even footing. To wit, there is nothing for either of us to understand. We are equals. For millennia, you falsely thought that I had wonderful abilities and skills that were the result of my being 500 feet tall and having a body to die for (and one day you will certainly be dead). You also wrongly thought I combined my immense strength with my IQ of 15 million points. It is true I am that tall and do have that many points stashed in my brain but it is all irrelevant to how I created the universe. It was sheer luck; I said “Let it happen,” and it did. No sleight-of-hand (which is teachable) and no fancy set of tools. No skills and no abilities, both of which would imply my powers were limited.
SG: The human body is a remarkably complex thing. How did you arrange it all? When you made Adam, did you not say, “Let him have a 4-chambered heart with this and that complex plumbing. Let him have billions of neurons with synapses to match. Let him have a blood type of… whatever it is he had.
MANOWAR: Not in the least. These things happened of their own accord. Remember, I am He Who is Most Adored and Noble, Worthy of Adulation and Reverence. That is because I am not a mere combination carpenter, plumber, electrician, nuclear physicist and guardian of the mayonnaise jar on the porchstep of Funk and Wagnall’s home. It is my inimitability alone that demands adulation and reverence. For that, mystery as it is for you and me, I make no apologies.
SG: In other words, I cannot aspire to such greatness that will allow me one day to build my own universe. Correct?
MANOWAR: Sadly, correct.
SG: Why “sadly”?
MANOWAR: just a facon de parler.
SG: One last thing. You are not putting me on? You really did create the world ex nihilo?
MANOWAR: I swear to all that is holy – namely, me- I did. Be glad.

Not many of us are good at managing our time. In thinking about this, I took a look at some internet articles on “wasting time” and the authors mainly listed trivial games that people play on their computers. I think they miss the point. The authors found most of the games trite, and so they downgraded time spent on those things. Granted that the games are trite, what of it? Supposed they played chess, GO, and other games demanding intelligence and great concentration. Would that mean they weren’t wasting their time? Games are not the stuff of life despite the brilliant defense of games as the only thing in life that has intrinsic value. [See Bernard Suits' ingenious defense of that view in his The Grasshopper, Games, Life and Utopia]. Suits argued that everything else we do in life other than playing is valuable only as a means to an end; games, alone, are an end in themselves. For example, what’s the point in being a physician? Presumably to make people well. And then what? What would you do if you were well? You’d probably play games. I am trivializing Suits’ very subtle analysis but that is pretty much the fundamental idea. I don’t want to take on Suits because I rather think that in an ideal world in which there were no problems, we might actually just sit around and do not much else but play games. Still, in the world as we find it, [what my students liked to call "the real world"], games are low in the scheme of worthwhile activities.

Although internet technology is loaded with tens of thousands of game programs, those frivolities exist for the sake of taking breathers from the real business of life As time has gone by, technological innovations have become less significant even as they have grown to be more wondrous.

I taught a course called “Philosophy and Technology” and asked my students to list the five greatest technological achievements. To my amazement, the most common item was cold fusion! I am still down for the count after that body blow. Everything else that appeared on their lists were developments of the last 70 years. For example, they like rocketry and antiballistic missiles. They were keen on “state-of-the-art” technology.

I suggested such items as the wheel, the hollowed-out log converted to a canoe, the move from gathering fruits that fall from tree to planting crops, turning stones into tools, and learning how to build fires ranked above cold fusion but to that they said, “Oh,that sort of thing.” I was not a “with it” sort of guy but an old fogey. In my annoyance, I went so far as to say modern medical technology wasn’t important. In fact, this is not terribly far from the truth since modern medical technology is driven largely by the thirst for profits. Incredibly expensive machinery is enlisted in the search for a new way to deal with exotic diseases or physical handicaps that have impact on no more than tens of thousands of people. Billions of dollars are poured into that enterprise whereas physicians would be more useful if they went into the public health fields. Handkerchiefs, malaria nets, sterile eating utensils and washed clothing could save the lives of many tens of millions of people. Clearly, the handkerchief and the facial tissue beat the piston-driven gadget that allows paraplegics to compete in their own special Olympics. The technology of the medical industry is largely a waste of time and money.

Once upon a time, people relied on their own resources for entertainment. Families gathered around a piano and one person played and the others sang songs. The victrola put an end to that and CDs ended the phonograph and have become a “necessity” in every home. TV sets without remote controls are as outmoded and unthinkable as fighting wars with bows and arrows. We are bathed in luxuries and we suppose that doing without them would be a waste of our precious time. “Let your fingers do the walking” applies to every facet of life, not just to telephone directories.

I am not preaching that technology is a bad thing. Even the Luddites did not think that. Much technology is deserving of praise. However, our ever-increasing reliance on the slightest advances of technology are making us less and less self-reliant and downright slothful. It is time , in fact, over-time, to stop worshipping the introduction of innovations that are consuming us and destroying our minds. Good heavens, kids can’t even play baseball today without aluminum bats.

Surveys show that people can’t imagine life without washing machines and air-conditioning. But these same surveys show that people don’t believe they are happier than people who lived prior to these contraptions. Technologies make us dependent on them but they don’t increase our happiness. In one important sense, nearly all technologies not directly involved in saving lives or making life bearable are time-wasters.

I used to read books; now, I “surf” the internet. This is definitely a retrograde move on my part. Who needs the Encyclopedia Britannica? In fact, the whole of that great work of erudition is contained on the internet. The funny thing is that, while I have downloaded it, I never consult it. I am too impatient. If I want to look up “Leo Durocher vs. Mel Ott as managers”, I have to go to the internet. It doesn’t even occur to me any longer that looking that up is stupid and a damned silly waste of my time. The distinction between good technology and time-wasting technology is so blurred that even to write about it has me wondering. Which side of the line does this post fall on? Time is valuable or, as those who make gobs of cash like to put it, “Time is money.” Now, I have to get on with it, whatever the “it” is, and have to end this post.