Seeing isn’t believing; what you already believe is what you’ll see.
“Seeing is believing” is one of the more familiar chestnuts.
But what if that’s wrong? What if we actually see what we’ve already decided to believe?
Recently, I listened again to a 2021 podcast, an interview with Michael Guillen on “The Profile,” from the United Kingdom’s Premier Christian Radio.
Guillen—a former Harvard physics instructor and Emmy-winning television journalist—told podcast host Justin Brierley about his slow, methodical conversion from atheism to Christianity, a conversion that took several decades.
I’ve mentioned “The Profile” in a couple of previous columns. The reason I like it is that it’s not your typical cookie-cutter, happy-chat religious broadcast. The guests, who hail from a variety of Christian and occasionally non-Christian traditions, tend to talk without flinching about their imperfect lives and winding spiritual pilgrimages.
But the interview with Guillen, first broadcast in September, is the one that’s stuck with me longest. Obsessed with science, he became an atheist early in life and thought he and his fellow nonbelievers were more enlightened than those with religious faith.
He was working on his doctorate in physics, math and astronomy at Cornell when he became bothered by what he felt was a contradiction in his worldview.
He also explained this last year in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
“When I was an atheist, a scientific monk sleeping three hours a day and spending the rest of my time immersed in studying the universe, my worldview rested on the core axiom that seeing is believing,” he wrote. “When I learned that 95% of the cosmos is invisible, consisting of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy,’ names for things we don’t understand, that core assumption became untenable. As a scientist, I had to believe in a universe I mostly could not see. My core axiom became ‘believing is seeing.’ Because what we hold to be true dictates how we understand everything—ourselves, others and our mostly invisible universe, including its origin. Faith precedes knowledge, not the other way around.”
This epiphany led him on a lengthy exploration of spiritual worldviews, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. He eventually found a home within Christianity. It resonated most for him personally, he said, but he’s not dismissive of those other traditions, from which he learned a great deal, or of science, which he still loves.
He doesn’t try to convert skeptics to his faith. He’s not one of those guys who makes a sport of holding public debates with atheists. He said such debates accomplish little. They don’t open the eyes of people on either side. Participants have their minds made up before they enter the debate hall and leave as they entered.
His observations boil down to three things, he said in the Wall Street Journal piece:
All worldviews are built on beliefs that can’t be proved. These core beliefs determine how we perceive reality. “Even reason itself … depends on faith,” he wrote. “Euclid’s geometry, the epitome of logical reasoning, is based on no fewer that 33 axiomatic, unprovable articles of faith.”
All worldviews have their own diameter: “That of atheism is relatively small, because it encompasses only physical reality. It has no room for other realities.”
All worldviews are ruled by a god or gods, a “who or what that occupies its center page.”
I probably find Guillen engaging because his observations reinforce my own.
In my graduate school studies and later in writing about religion as a newspaper reporter, I saw the same phenomenon he did. I realized that, no matter what we claim, we come to any situation with a preconceived worldview that determines how we’ll approach and interpret that situation.
For instance, I once reported on a group of religion scholars who were trying to decide how many of the New Testament’s sayings and stories about Jesus might be factual. They ruled out all the stories of Jesus’ miracles as fiction—because these scholars assumed a closed universe in which divine intervention couldn’t exist. Anything that smacked of the miraculous, then, was by definition made up.
You see the problem here. The New Testament’s authors assume an open universe in which God not only exists but interacts with people both inside and outside the realm of what can be seen with the senses or, today, scientifically measured.
If you read those gospels assuming the stories they tell are by definition impossible, you’re bound to find that they’re not true.
But what happens if you go into your examination of the gospels assuming we don’t know everything about the universe and that it’s possible extraordinary things occurred that even our current scientific rules can’t explain?
Well, you’ll come away with a very different take on those same stories.
As Guillen said, we tend to see what we’ve already chosen to believe.
Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.