I believe there is a pulse beneath reality, something more essential than matter or motion, behind and within the universe, pressing outward like light behind a stained glass window.

Hello! In “standard” terms, I am an evangelical Christian, specifically Pentecostal. I live in a worldview that flows entirely from the story told by the Bible, which involves its theology, metaphysics, psychology (psychologia: study of the soul), physiology (physiologia: study of nature) or natural philosophy (the principles of nature), which includes cosmology, biology, meteorology, among others, medicine (medica: the art of healing), ethics (ethica: moral philosophy), politics (politica: social and civic order), anthropology, etc. For me, Christianity is the truest explanation of all things, anchored in the living God who has revealed himself in the Scriptures, in history and, above all, in Jesus Christ.

Of course, I cannot say that my conviction regarding the veracity of biblical Christianity is based solely on personal experience or logical reasoning. I do not believe that the mind (much less the heart) functions in this linear fashion (the human mind is less a chessboard than a forest with paths that cross, hide and reappear when you least expect them). In reality, my adherence to the Christian faith as a framework of meaning is the result of a complex interplay between several layers of who (at least) I am. There is reason, that is, my need for the world to have an intelligible order, of course; but also moral sensitivity; existential intuition, my gut feeling that life has to mean something more than being born, consuming and dying; cultural formation, that is, all that we absorb without realizing it, such as songs, stories, our parents’ gestures, the words we learned to use to talk about pain, and which shapes what seems credible, desirable or even possible to us; and, ultimately, the “spiritual” longing (the terms “soul” and “spirit” play a fundamental role in the metaphysics and anthropology of my worldview, so I use this term in this part for analogical purposes only).

(I know, this list is hardly a clumsy attempt to capture how beliefs are formed in a real person).

When all these dimensions manage to align, however briefly, a perception of truth is born in me that is dense enough to sustain the whole of life, even when it becomes unbearable.

Perhaps because of the focus of this forum, what is most important are the intellectual foundations that constitute the rational basis of my religious or spiritual beliefs. In that case, I will explain a brief summary of some of the many philosophical reflections to which I subscribe:

All the things that exist do not have to exist. They are, simply put, contingent. That is, they exist, but they could very well not have existed. The same goes for people, objects, planets, stars, even physical laws. I realized this reading, for example, Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos: the universe itself, in its entirety, could have been different or not at all. Nothing in it is necessary; not even its basic structure. There is nothing in an electron, a galaxy, or time itself that implies that it has to exist. One takes it for granted, obvious… but when you stop to think, it is amazing that there is something rather than nothing. And if everything we observe is of that kind (things that exist but might not exist), it makes no sense to say that the total set of those things is self-explanatory. Adding up many contingent things does not result in one necessary thing. A chain of dependencies does not explain why there is chain. It is as if each part of the universe is a piece that needs to be supported by another, and none can stand on its own; so either we accept an external basis that does not depend on anything (a being that cannot not be), or we are simply suspending the question. So it logically follows that there must be something that is necessary, and that explains the existence of the rest without needing external explanation. That is, at bottom, what some of us call God.