What Is Not – by William C. Green

The world doesn’t wait to be explained. Not everything that was explained was understood. Perhaps truth depends as much on knowing what is not true as on knowing what is true.

Since my day job is preaching, I have begun to question explanations that make the world seem small. Too many answers and the world becomes less vibrant than the one they found. [*]

For many nineteenth-century thinkers, “God,” “history,” or “progress” ensured that suffering was not meaningless. Hegel, Marx, and some religious thinkers, in very different ways, imagined the loss of the individual as part of a larger movement toward reconciliation, liberation, or divine purposes. The price was high. Actual suffering could eventually be absorbed into a narrative that promised innocence.

For many thinkers in the 20th century, and still today, “markets” or “technology” became the new safety net. Global trade, economic growth, digital speed, and now AI promise deliverance from limitations we no longer know how to accept. Optimists call the hollowing out of communities, climate change, and loneliness “growing pains.” Pessimists also do their part. If you predict the worst frequently, someone will mistake you for a prophet.

In both cases, and throughout modern thought since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, reality is often reduced to a material basis. Even God and consciousness are products of particles, chemistry, brain states, and social circumstances whose effects are open to explanation.

But this strict materialism hit a wall. To explain how the physical brain feels things, philosophers are revisiting panpsychism and related theories of mind. The old assumption that mind is a late byproduct of matter is no longer reassuring.

Scientific naturalism expands our understanding of matter and opens up the possibility for matter to have an existence of its own.

This irony is no longer limited to seminar rooms. in The World Appears: A Journey into ConsciousnessAuthor and journalist Michael Pollan brings a familiar curiosity to consciousness itself, moving between neuroscience, philosophy, literature, spirituality, psychedelics, AI, and plants.

Pollan uses the behavior of plants and the limits of machine intelligence to ask questions that cannot be easily answered by a machine worldview. Where does cognition begin and what form does it take? Trees, flowers, rodents, and even pests don’t have to resemble humans to challenge the assumption that nature is mindless.

A cultural shift is underway. Just as we realize that our smartest computers can’t feel, we’re beginning to wonder if the natural world we dismissed as having no mind was ever as silent as we once imagined.

In the literature, it has long been known how to notice what a system misses. Willa Cather was fascinated by the mysteries of the Southwest and resisted “East Coast standards” that, in her view, replaced the humane and special with the cold and manufactured. in Death comes to the Archbishop (1927), she hoped to preserve an already fragile psyche. The novel became a particularly literary act of preservation.

Awareness of loss complicates the jealousy of “progress” that lies at the heart of cultural divides. “It just connects,” wrote EM Forster, another novelist who questions modern fragmentation. This phrase is now in danger of becoming a slogan for the wellness industry, which creates connection as positive thinking. In Cather’s hands, connection is not a mood. It’s a fidelity to something that might disappear.

Ironically, this language of connection is now returning, not just through literature and memory, but through the strangest realms of science itself. Nonlocality and entanglement do not prove God, prayer, or transcendence. But they challenge the old image of reality as a hermetic machine made of isolated parts.

That possibility is important for “intercessory prayer.” If reality is more deeply connected than mechanical imagination allows, then prayer need not be a cry into the void. It may be an alignment with the fabric of a responsive being where the movement of the mind here resonates more broadly than we can measure.

My prayers for you, and your prayers for me, are actually Casehas weight in our lives and exists within the structure of things.

As we grapple with these big questions, it becomes clear to ask what is not true. Get rid of the idols that make the world feel inevitable.

This is the mystery of René Magritte la belle captivea picture about seeing itself. The frame suggests reality, but the image shows how easily appearances harden into certainty. The danger is not ignorance, but the spread of false ideas as knowledge.

As philosopher and critic of modern reductionism Ian McGilchrist suggests, this hardening is a danger of left-brain dominance. We mistake flat representations, definitions, and simplified maps for the living world. We get so caught up in the frame that we forget that the model is never the reality it is trying to contain.

The Bible itself provides room for this rejection of easy certainty. Work demands answers. The book of Ecclesiastes gives voice to weariness and disillusionment. Thomas is doubtful. Jacob wrestles. Peter fails. Faith was not simply inherited. It was meant to be tested. Not destroyed. Not abandoned. Tested.

Early mystics knew that the closest we can get to God is often by getting rid of small certainties. Wisdom begins with respect for ignorance. We don’t need new doctrine to break free from a flat view of reality. It requires a willingness to say no to any explanation of the world that diminishes it. Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “This is true knowledge of what is sought; this is a seeing that consists of not seeing.”

This negative approach provides clear clarity. You don’t need scientific proof or perfected theology to know the reality of the living forest or the truth of prayer.

We just have to look at the promises and pretense of our time and say with confidence: this is not all.

In that honest refusal, the world comes alive again.

notes and reading

[*] Herman Melville was concerned about this. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne in June 1851, he humorously described this difficulty: “I have fallen into the old weakness of preaching.” A few lines later he added: The letters collected in “Try to make a living by the truth, and go to the Soup Society.” God’s Magnet: Letters from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2016) shows Melville at his most explorative, excessive, comical, and spiritually restless. Hawthorne described Melville’s mind as wandering “in a desert, as dreary and monotonous as a dune of sand,” adding, “He cannot believe, nor be content with unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous to do one or the other.”

• “Every definitive description of the universe is a mask put on by our ignorance.” Owen Barfield was a revelation to me. A strange and illuminating guide to how perceptions become beliefs. Barfield, a friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, claimed: Preserving Appearance: A Study of Idolatry (1957) argue that idolatry is not only religious. Ideas, images, and descriptions become idols when they are mistaken for reality itself.

• “Theory of Everything”—In physics, this phrase expresses the hope for a single framework that unifies the fundamental forces of nature. The title also resonates. all theory (2014), a movie about Stephen Hawking. The dream of the final equation meets love, vulnerability, and an excess of life beyond explanation.

• taylor dotson Divide: How fanatic beliefs are destroying democracy (2021)—Political polarization is brought about not simply by ignoring facts, but by clinging to truths solidified as beliefs. reference. Jonathan Sacks Healing a Broken World: An Ethics of Responsibility (2005), on faith as a discipline for living with uncertainty.

• Ian Bluma: “What would you do? The morally compromised people who allowed the rise of the Nazis” new statesman (May 8-14, 2026) – Burma’s warning is not that Weimar Germany will simply resemble the present. That is, democracy can fail when competing certainties make a common political world impossible. The Weimar Republic was crippled by the nation’s radically different mindsets, and few were prepared to defend the fragile republic they actually had. Too many people preferred the dream state to the republic in front of them.

• Max Weber “Science as a Vocation” (1919) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)—The modern world has not simply lost faith. Learn to organize your life as a calculation, a method, a control. The cage becomes rational before it becomes iron. Kafka expressed it perfectly: “The cage went looking for the bird.”

• michael pollan The World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (2026) – Moving between neuroscience, philosophy, literature, spirituality, psychedelics, plants, and AI, Pollan brings the mysteries of consciousness to the public eye. He doesn’t solve problems. He helps restore that depth.

• Willa Cather Death comes to the Archbishop (1927), E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)—Cather’s Southwestern novel is preservation, not nostalgia. It is an attempt to honor a particular spiritual and cultural world before the flattening of imported standards of progress. Forster’s “Only connect” is one of the great modern appeals against fragmentation. For both writers, connection is not a feeling, but a fidelity to something that might disappear. reference. Shakespeare’s winter storyThere, loss, alienation, time, and reconciliation come together in the hope that what seemed lost may yet be restored. And in the parable of the prodigal son, what seemed lost is restored not by explanation but by welcome.

• Jeffrey Kopelsky, “Quantum Mechanics and Theology” St. Andrew’s Theological Encyclopedia (2026) – A recent scholarly overview of how quantum theory has entered theological considerations, particularly debates surrounding indeterminacy and the limits of mechanistic explanation. Danger is a simple metaphor. The possibility is a renewed humility in the face of a reality stranger than mechanics.

• ian mcgilchrist master and his messenger (2009) and problems with things (2021)—McGilchrist’s explanation of divided attention helps explain the state of captivity named in this essay. In other words, the left hemisphere grasps, corrects, maps, and controls. Rights remain open to existence, relationships, and lived reality. The danger is not in analysis itself, but in its ascendance to the throne. Maps are useful until landscape modifications begin.

René Magritte la belle captive (1950)—Frame suggests reality. The images make that suggestion unsettling. Reflected flames strengthen the warning. Appearances can harden into convictions, but they can also reveal initial truths. This is not all. When certainty disappears, reality resumes.

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