Spirituality Column #776

September 28, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Welcome Aboard

By Bob Walters

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5

Myself being a late-comer to faith in Christ I have perhaps a heightened compassion for those whose faith is bound up in the small and tight space of science.

I was never a scientist – not even close – but I have lots of beloved friends, family, and acquaintances who are.  Some live in faith; some don’t.  They cover the spectrum of having wide open and robust faith, no faith, some faith, seekers, no interest, lifelong believers, and never-in-a-million-years ”nones.” 

There are scientists I attend worship with every week, and some who would never open a Bible or darken a church door.  Some are all-in.  Some are curious, some sneer.  Some are respectful but distant: maybe embarrassed by the practices and optics of what a Sunday morning in church looks like or says about them.

What I accept is that their faith is their own business.  I can explain my faith to them (1 Peter 3:15), but I can’t explain their faith to them.  Sharing faith in Christ – with others – is a special and mysterious bond I never understood the first 47 years of my life.  It is not a bond I can imagine being conjured or forged in a scientific lab.

Scientists are on my mind this week because of a new book by Michael Guillen, “Believing is Seeing, A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith. Name ring a bell?  He has multiple PhDs, taught at Harvard, and was an Emmy winning science editor and reporter for ABC News.

I love Guillen’s story even before reading the book (which I ordered): a Harvard atheist discovers no explanation for the expansive, invisible world other than the very hand of God.  Guillen explains that as an atheist and scientist he was constricted to materially understanding the totality of all things as limited by their physical nature. He was wrong.

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal Houses of Worship editorial feature Why Atheists Need Faith (link), Guillen described, briefly, how his intellect grew beyond science and how among world religions and philosophies, he landed amid Christianity.

I’m one to follow Jesus more than to “follow the science.”  Jesus doesn’t change, and science always does.  Our culture wants to postulate that science, i.e., “seeing is believing,” will somehow, can somehow, replace God.  But that’s nonsense; science helps to reveal God.  I notice the Bible is big on Why, but not How.  And I believe God bequeathed us science to search for Him and discover His “How.”  Believing is seeing. 

G.K. Chesterton noted in his 1908 “Orthodoxy” that “every circle is infinitely round, but there is tyranny in its circumference.”  Translated, any field of study – law, science, philosophy, etc. – defines its size, breadth, reach, and scope by what it allows itself to imagine.  Minus God, human enterprise and purpose shrink to nothingness. 

Guillen observed that while the physical world is limited, the spiritual world is not. “Faith is the foundation of the entire human experience,” he writes.  “Our faith in spiritual reality drives us to seek treatments for diseases, to create works of art, music and architecture, and to see life as divine creation, not an accident of nature.”  Right on.

Polls meant to discourage cultural attitudes toward faith are no match – ever – for a human heart, mind, and soul that grasp Jesus Christ.  Welcome aboard, Dr. Guillen.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will likely have more to say after reading the book.