Happenings Newsletter

Michael Guillen, Ph.D. flips the saying, “Seeing is believing” as he progresses from his younger self—a curious, 5/8 Mexican boy born in East LA, raised in a very traditional Spanish-speaking Pentecostal Christian family, in which the men were ministers—to choosing a life as a highly educated scientist. Guillen explains his belief that science was the go-to authority and his need to know and rely on evidence were the reasons he subscribed to a worldview based on logic over faith. After receiving a BS in physics and mathematics from UCLA, he ventured far from his California roots to pursue graduate studies in physics at Cornell University in New York. He was both geographically and philosophically, far, too, as he abandoned his family’s religion—one he never truly embraced, to begin life as an Atheist and “scientific monk.” He sought answers to questions about what lies beyond our planet, what the universe was made of, and how it began based on observations and logical, mathematical proof. Yet, in the book’s Introduction, Guillen says a worldview is “your own personal Svengali, the all-powerful puppeteer deep within your subconscious that pulls your strings, that controls not only how you see everything but how you react to everything….” It is, he writes, ultimately how you view yourself, others, the cosmos, and God. He adds that “faith, far from being a weakness, is far stronger than logic, stronger than empirical evidence…” and it is a mysterious agent that supports one’s worldview. In this book he outlines the basis of this perspective and leads us to his conclusion that “believing is seeing.” At Cornell, he delved deep into physics, astronomy, and mathematics to understand galaxies—earning a triple Ph.D. in all three fields and going on to teach physics at Harvard. After a chance encounter with a CBS correspondent, he also ended up as a science reporter for CBS Morning News, adding three Emmys and several groundbreaking TV news contributions to his already illustrious academic accomplishments. His Cornell studies introduced him to the mysteries of "dark matter" and "dark energy,” and the fact that 95 percent of the universe is invisible, meaning that faith was necessary to pursue answers to these unseen phenomena. That realization threw him off. Through his ongoing questioning and exploration, he ultimately came to the same conclusion that Psychologist William James did: that exploring hypotheses in science requires a "will to believe." He needed to adjust to the fact that not everything in the universe can be directly observed or personally experienced. The book describes IQ (trivial and logical truths and realities that can be seen, proven, and imagined) versus SQ (spiritual intelligence, which considers what cannot be seen, proven, or imagined), and examines examples of misguided and enlightened faith of each. He unpacks the notion of having “faith in faith,” breaking down the scientific method and its need for faith-based intelligence. Next, reviews his “Awakenings”—what he learned in his studies about galaxies, quantum fields, string theories, and translogical or deep, profound thinking to put it all together. He explains, in short order, each of these, clearly enough for a non-physicist to grasp, before introducing the following chapter—The Reckoning—about meeting a curious young woman who was an intelligent and avid reader. They decided to read the Bible over the course of two years and discuss it together, since neither one had ever read it in its entirety. Seeing a lot of similarities between Christianity and Quantum Physics, his Reckoning chapter illustrates his comparison of the beliefs and tenets of science and those of Christianity. Though they read other religious books, their evaluation only compared and contrasted scientific, Atheistic, and Christian worldviews in order to determine which best fit together, if any did at all. They covered several questions in the process, narrowing it down to “three deep questions” for the worldview of each category: • Does absolute truth exist? • Are there truths that cannot be proven? • Is the universe designed for life? Guillen looks at how each worldview relates to each question, and, spoiler alert, ultimately decides that, based on the detailed information he has laid out, a clear correlation exists between scientific and Christian worldviews, while Atheism exhibits no relation to the three deep questions. Thus, Guillen concludes that Atheism is fundamentally opposed to the scientific worldview, the Christian worldview is fundamentally in line with the scientific worldview, and that his past belief that Atheism best aligned with science was now turned upside down. Yet, he still had more questions and lays out how he pursued those further. While I was surprised to see a highly educated scientist and devout Atheist for much of his life, not only outline his decision to return to his early belief in Christianity, or to discuss religion at all in this discussion of his scientific career path. Yet, he looks at concepts that many of us are weighing when faced with profound truths, the origins of the universe, or the mysteries of life and death. Guillen is not alone in expressing his acceptance of faith in a creator or higher power while studying how the universe came to be. Brian Keating, a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and the principal investigator at Simons Observatory describes himself as an expert in the study of the universe’s oldest light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), using it to learn about the origin and evolution of the universe. In a recent interview, Keating explained that, though most scientists “find it distasteful for a real scientist to even contemplate the possibility of God,” he considers himself to be a devout agnostic who has no problem as a researcher including a belief in God while studying universal evolution. He supports the idea of exploring how the scientific evidence connects to the creation stories of religions such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Readers interested in Guillen’s discussion of his research in physics, mathematics, and astronomy, his career as an Emmy-winning science correspondent for CBS, or his acceptance of a Christian doctrine in understanding not only science, will find his story well told, unfolding all of these aspects in an easy-to-follow account of his personal search for answers.