God and Science Go Together According to Physicist

FROM ATHEISM TO CHRISTIANITY 

 “It was a long and winding road,” Dr. Michael Guillen says of his journey to faith in God. He was born in East L.A., to a Christian family in the heart of a Mexican barrio. His dad and both grandfathers were Pentecostal ministers, which meant young Michael was in church seven days a week.

“They were awkward, long services,” he recalls. "The sermons were two hours long.” While he loved the people, the food, and playing the drums, Dr. Guillen says the teaching meant nothing to him. “It was in Spanish, which I didn’t know well. By the time I went to college,” Guillen confesses, “I was a practical atheist. Someone who believes in God but lives as if he doesn’t.”  

He stopped reading his Bible and putting God first in his life. In the years that followed, Michael studied Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Transcendental Meditation, but was most persuaded by science. “There’s a general conceit embraced by atheists,” he admits. Guillen has an enormous empathy for them, based on his understanding of that frame of mind. In that system of thought, “logic is superior to faith,” he states. 

Fully steeped in his science studies, Michael had no desire to consider the claims of Christianity. That is, until a pretty, young co-ed at Cornell, named Laurel, slipped a Valentine’s Day card under his door.

“Laurel was an undergraduate who had taken my Physics for Poets class more than a year earlier. She made an impression on me because she sat in the front row and always asked smart questions. Moreover, she was tall, beautiful, and had big brown eyes,” he fondly recalls.  

The pair started meeting to talk. “She sensed in me ‘a latent spirituality.’ Those were her exact words. She found my exploration of world religions from a scientist’s perspective uniquely fascinating because she herself was searching for deep meaning and purpose in life but, so far, had come up empty. During a discussion about Christianity one day, she said, 'Hey, I’ve never read the Bible, either. If you read it, I’ll read it with you.'"

Guillen said it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. “Not because I was particularly keen on revisiting a book I felt didn’t have anything for me, but because I wanted to spend more time with Laurel,” he admits. “Little did I know the experience would change my life forever.” The pair read – and thoroughly discussed – the Bible for the next two years.  

While the Old Testament only left Michael depressed, the New Testament was a different story.  “Wow – the lights suddenly came on for me,” he says.  Guillen began to grow in his newfound beliefs and says there are three things that the Lord used to change his heart:

1. That the universe has a beauty that is more than skin deep. For example, the one-celled organism or the choreography of the cosmos. “This whole thing was created by a Supreme Being,” says Michael.

2. That if a person can believe in black holes and multiple universes, then it would be no big deal to believe in God. 

3. That in science there is one truth and one set of laws. This showed Michael the uncompromising truth that there is one truth, one standard of right and wrong. It was easy for him to believe.

As for Laurel, she and Dr. Guillen recently celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary.  

FAITH AND WORLDVIEW

“Every person on earth is a ‘person of faith,’” Dr. Guillen maintains. “It’s either based on absolute truth or on personal opinion and experience. What we believe is how we see.”  He makes a likewise claim about worldview, as he defines it. “Everyone has a worldview – your bubble of reality. Your worldview, the sum total of your beliefs, determines everything about you. From how you see, think, react, and respond to things and people, to how you dress speak and carry yourself. Your worldview is your most valuable possession. When trouble strikes, your worldview is your best friend or your worst enemy,” he says. No matter one’s worldview, Guillen says we all need to answer three questions:

1.    What’s the foundation of your worldview?
2.    What’s the size of your worldview?
3.    What’s at the center of your worldview? 

In considering the foundation of our worldviews, Dr. Guillen says: “Whatever your worldview, it is founded on faith,” he claims. It is unavoidably founded on ideas and feelings that cannot be proved. Even if your world view is evidence-based, to use a popular buzzword, it is founded on axiomatic beliefs which you can’t prove, see, or even fully imagine. Your worldview, therefore, even if it is atheistic, is faith-based.”  

Regarding the size of one’s worldview, Guillen recalls the beliefs of his early days. “For decades, I explored worldviews other than the strictly scientific one, until gradually and slowly, parsec by parsec, the diameter of my worldview grew. Finally, it expanded to the size it is today – capacious enough to accommodate faith not only in science’s many far-out notions, but also in the God of the Bible, in Jesus, and in the Holy Spirit. Is your worldview as big as all that? Or is it the size that mine was when I was a scientific monk?”  

As to the center of our worldviews, Dr. Guillen says this: “Whether it’s the God of the Bible, the god of tolerance, the god of success, or whatever person or principle you hold most dear, that person or thing is your deity, the god at the center of your worldview, the definer of your religion.” He believes it matters profoundly what or who is at the core.