A World Stubbornly in the Grip of Goodness
I was raised Pentecostal in Mississippi, left the faith entirely as a teenager, but years later, thanks to philosophical study and honest reflection, made my way back to the Christian sphere, though without personally settling the question of “belief.” I am living this paradoxical condition every day. Perhaps many others are too.
I have always had a strong metaphysical, quasi-mathematical intuition that the whole of reality is composed of more dimensions, more realms and compartments, than the natural world can account for: The whole of existence is very likely not exhausted by the natural. I shall always gravitate towards a multi-compartmental model of reality, where many of reality’s chambers may very well be indiscernible to the methods of physics or human observation.
I am an embodiment journeying towards belief. Faith seeking greater confidence. That is what being a Christian means to me. It may well be the work of a lifetime.
Further, it has always made sense to me that some causal crosstalk among sectors—between life and afterlife, between present and future, between the seen and unseen—can occur, in subtle ways imperceptible to conventional modes of science. And so I take theism seriously—it is surely the most consequential case of multicompartmental interaction in the history of thought.
This Sliver of Time
Inside our living experience of this bewildering and complex reality, in which I feel an inclination towards theism, I feel also the ironclad pressure of certain moral propositions. “It is wrong to torture an innocent child,” “I have a duty to make the most of my life with the sliver of time allotted me,” and so on. Ethics is complicated, but at least a few propositions are firmly knowable, I believe. If existence is made up of multiple realms, and if moral values and duties are utterly unlike the material elements comprising the physical universe, then it is plausible intellectually to situate such moral entities in a realm beyond the universe, the realm of Goodness.[1]
I regard this meta-ethical realm as a spiritual one, a realm replete with mystery both in itself and in the relations it offers to us finite spirits. In this realm I also house or intertwine aesthetic truth, given how beauty often magnifies the call to the ethical life or sends the spirit aflutter in a way that creates a stronger impulse towards the ethical. And ethico-spiritual truth seems to point to ethico-spiritual growth. We can become the sorts of beings that are animated by these truths instead of blandly accepting them like a detached scientist or metaphysician. Indeed, we should remain wondrously open to the concrete possibility that the very existence that embeds these truths wants us to grow in that fashion rather than contenting ourselves with sterile neutrality. In short, there is an intuition here of teleology. The presence of ethico-spiritual truth indicates an ethico-spiritual order—a gradient, as it were—that we can grow and elevate into.
Embodying Belief
All of the above is a compilation of inclinations, gravitations, leanings, felt likelihoods. It primes an openness to Christian theism, and even to embodying Christian theism— letting its aromas shape my psyche—without feeling that this is delusional.[2] Yet I do not claim the confidence of “belief” with respect to God’s existence, not yet. Does it make sense then to call myself a Christian?
I believe so. Many of the questions that most ardently saturate and pulse within the soul don’t have sure answers. “1 plus 1 is 2” is a statement whose credence—the term for intellectual confidence—lies comfortably at 100 percent. “If I drop this apple, it will fall down” possesses a credence vanishingly close to 100, but not at 100, since theoretically the laws of physics could change, and the apple, upon release, could morph into an orange and disappear. Credence at the other end of the scale—zero and near-zero—attaches to propositions like “1 plus 1 is 3.” Meanwhile the statement, “There is an even number of atoms in the universe at this moment,” enshrines a credence perfectly situated at 50 percent, since the number must be either even or odd.
Gray Areas
In stark contrast stand the answers to many of the questions we care most about, even though their credence is debatable. Is there not only Goodness, but a God—an active, conscious, caring Goodness at the helm of it all? Is there life after death? Do we have meaningful free will? Is light more powerful than darkness? Is there a soul? Intellectually, I am in the “positive gray” zone with respect to these questions and with Christian theism more broadly—somewhere between 50 and 100 percent; a good deal more than 50, but not close to 100. That middling status rules out confident belief, yet it does not prevent me from embodying the Christian vision and many of its practices, such as prayer. It does not prevent embodying the fruits of the Spirit—attentiveness, gratitude, trust, love, and other commitments. It does not prevent embodying the Christian hope that, despite the chaos and decay made visible all around us, this universe is heading towards a lastingly Good end. I am an embodiment journeying towards belief. Faith seeking greater confidence. That is what being a Christian means to me. It may well be the work of a lifetime.
From this positive gray position, how can I come to know God? How can I come to best know God? Philosophical arguments for God’s existence cannot bestow the intimate, marrow-deep knowledge I seek. Such arguments can open up a sufficiently large space of possibility for God’s existence and can energize the will to undertake a deeper journey, but they will always be contestable, hinging on elusive metaphysical or epistemological subtleties. Even the moral argument for God’s existence, which has an understandable premise (“objective moral values and duties exist”), rests on a meta-ethical premise that is passionately contested (“if objective moral values and duties exist, they have God as their Ground and Issuer”). That premise is more likely true than not, I feel, but certainty or near-certainty on that front looks like a pipe dream.
An Aubade of Anxiety
These questions of existential unease are compounded by another factor, a personal disquiet around some variant of death anxiety, a true dread rooted in the concrete possibility that bodily death will be followed by a cessation of consciousness and an obliteration of the self for the rest of eternity. For all the reasons the secular poet Philip Larkin expresses in “Aubade,” I find that prospect terrifying. Thus the background of my psyche is often a battle between light and dark, serenity and howling nothingness. Where can deliverance from this condition lie if philosophy saunters here impotently?
I believe the start of an answer resides in relaxed openness, in wonder. It is useful to think of art. True, art often elicits its own kind of existential unease, which serves as a fuel enabling many an artist to create in the first place. But it also often elicits wonder, and wonder, in turn, redirects our eyes from the cupboard of theory—from our stockpiles of existential questions and cued-up answers—to the concrete world of the senses. I begin to see the existence of contingent things as miracles and human subjects as the biggest miracles of all. Art, at its best, reminds us that all the world is worth our marvel. Living with wonder, astonishment, attentiveness, trust, and love—the Spirit’s fruits, dignified by art as well—perhaps we will acquire an ability to breathe long-lastingly, and perhaps the atomic bits of our soul will wiggle and constellate in a new way that enables the rays of God’s light to be apprehended as God’s light, and we will have gained the intimacy we sought. Perhaps these are not spasms of fantasy born of an overactive and desirous imagination, but a structural truth of creation itself—that we can live our way into the answer, live our way into God.
Maybe this intimate knowledge requires spiritual effort to obtain, and may require stumbling and falling multiple times in the course of a life. It is plausible that a good God has designed us in precisely this way, and the only way one can know for sure is to take a breath and take the plunge.
Physics and Metaphysics
I believe upholding wonder, astonishment, attentiveness, trust, and love is the key to greater confidence washing over the soul. Again a parallel with art proves useful. I once heard it said that “art is a language for exploring mystery.” This sounds right, but incomplete. I believe the mystery it explores is the mystery of the spiritual realm, a realm that webs its way through the natural world and every other world with abandon. In that rich exploration, we more deeply connect with it. In that exploration, we become all the more coextensive with it. The mystery of ourselves is solaced and bolstered by the mystery of the world. Sometimes the growth is slow and gradual—it flowers from a prolonged swim in the aesthetic currents of the spiritual realm while we dedicate ourselves to virtues like patience and humility. At other times it comes on like a burst, something quick and unprecedented. Setting sail in this ocean, we can trust that meticulously exploring its mystery through art or other disciplines or habits will lead to revelations, even the kind of spiritual growth that eclipses all expectations. The tendrils of transformation extend into the human soul, bearing an infinite mystery of their own. Hand-in-hand with their limitless spirit is limitless possibility.
Whether as a set of intuitions or practices, or as a complicated hope that haunts and yet gives life to the soul, Christianity remains an ever-present force in my life. I’m still on the path because I believe I can trust that a rich, dense, mesmerizing exploration of the spiritual realm will lead to growth—and greater confidence. Because that world, no matter its mystery, is still fundamentally gripped by Goodness. If I regard existence as the combination of the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, I might reasonably conclude that, to fully grow, I should be maximally intentional about breathing in mystery via wonder, astonishment, openness, attentiveness, gratitude, trust, and love, including acts of artistic immersion framed by them, letting its gentle, capacious fires sift through my physical and metaphysical bones.
Ian Barclay ’24 M.A.R. has a B.A. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and an M.S. in mathematics and M.S. in medical biology from Mississippi College. He taught math and physics at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science before coming to Yale. He was recently named to the faculty of the Brearley School in New York City and will teach math and coach a math team there.
[1] In Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Pelican Books, 1977), the renowned atheistic philosopher J.L. Mackie wrote, “If there were objective [moral] values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe” (p. 38). Entities like moral values are what make moral propositions true to begin with, similar to how the actual existence of various physical entities is the entire reason why various scientific statements are true. Mackie, given his atheistic and naturalistic leanings, could not see where to plausibly house such values, but someone with more metaphysically adventurous or theistic leanings need not share that difficulty.
[2] By contrast, I cannot sincerely embody the proposition “someone will randomly drop a million dollars on my lap in the next hour”; trying to do so would make me feel delusional.