Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith

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What might be less appreciated are the many forms in which bias can permeate a microscopy experiment. From what we can tell (which is precious little), it behaves like a repulsive force that causes the universe to balloon out an accelerating speed.

I agree that one aspect of humans is that we have a spiritual side that is more developed and unique in the animal kingdom and should not be dismissed. The author delves into the parallels between belief in science and belief in Christianity, showing how both belief systems provide similar answers to certain fundamental questions. A few weird inserts of unwarranted opinions as well as cheesy final pages near the end slow down his momentum, but excellent nonetheless.I’m still looking for that answer but I find the same thing in every “proof Of Christianity” book… author has an epiphany, turns to Christ, and becomes a judgmental prick. While these types of statements are common in documentary films, serving to summarize a complex subject or individual, they can sound trite in a book that asks to be read in the fields of art history, visual culture studies, anthropology, and philosophy.

In my own experience of facilitating and taking part in such processes of ‘deeper questioning’, simply the practice of asking such questions to get clear about the different perspectives and the assumptions that inform us can help to open up a gateway towards the resolution of what can initially be perceived as a irreconcilable conflict. Morris begins his first chapter with a quotation from Sontag regarding Fenton’s photograph(s) The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855). Guillen makes a distinction between IQ and SQ (the spiritual equivalent of IQ on faith related topics). Each of its six chapters originally appeared, in different form, in the Opinionator blog of The New York Times, and each centers on a photo or photo set: two slightly different pictures taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War; the infamous Abu Ghraib images, over two chapters; Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein; pictures of children’s toys lying in the rubble after Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon in 2006; and an ambrotype of three young children that was found clutched in the hand of a dead Union soldier at Gettysburg in 1863. Guillen does a superb job of detailing how, as a self-proclaimed “scientific monk,” he came to God not through the Bible or any religious text or anyone telling him to go to church—but through the wonders of the universe by studying physics.Temporal relations are never seen in ordinary perception, but they can be seen in the image, provided the image is creative. For the first several chapters, the author talks about his own life journey and how he eventually moved toward faith in God.

G’s personal story may be inspiring for some and useful for Christians wondering how to fit science and faith together. Indeed, they are the very questions that motivate contemporary discourse on photography; they are the questions that have forced photographic practice and theory to think and to create. What beliefs underlie my perspective and how have these beliefs influenced what I observed and which data I chose?But I mention it only to sharply contrast it with Morris’s conclusion on this issue: “And even if Sontag is right, namely that Fenton moved the cannonballs to telegraph the horrors of war, what’s so bad about that? This last shows moments of flair, as when he compares Gorbachev’s estate to “a metastatic International House of Pancakes. Guillen alludes to the age of earth in millions of years and I’m not sure what exactly his beliefs are regarding a literal six day creation. I was reminded that Atheism is a worldview in itself that takes leaps of faith- how can we know for certain there is no God? As a thermal engineer, I rely on the laws of thermodynamics to make nearly all of my analyses and designs.