Hello Stu, again, thanks for your thoughts on this. I’m not sure if I understand why Dr. Guillen’s motives are questioned. Yes, the article is to promote his book but it appears to be a summary of what the book’s primary message is, which is how he came to the position that believing is seeing. So are you questioning his motives in writing the book? If so, wouldn’t the physicalist advocates like Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins etc also have questionable motives?
I have to disagree a bit in your definition of faith. For believers, the definition provided in the book of Hebrews is important: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Faith includes hope and evidence of things not seen. I would suggest that physicalist believers in the multiverse exhibit faith according to this definition. First, hope because the multiverse idea emerged as a solution to the incredible problem of fine tuning which seemed to provide nearly indisputable evidence for design. Design or chance are the options and given the nature of the coincidences the chance option required an infinity or near infinity of chances. There is no evidence for it. The multiverse is unseen and most say it will never be seen. Faith in this idea constitutes the substance of hope and evidence for the unseen. I could give some other examples of the relationship of faith in God and faith in some of the basic tenets of physicalism, but you get the point.
I’m not sure what you mean by Isaac Newton’s scientific inquiries stopped. There is the old and on-going fear of how belief in God can and does stop science. I don’t buy that. For one thing, only 10% of Nobel laureates are or were atheists, the rest had some belief in God, a higher power or spiritual realities. Didn’t seem to stop them. Also, the remarkable advances of science in the early periods of the scientific revolution were almost all by Christian believers. There is understanding now that the belief in the creator God and the reliability the creator established in the mechanisms of the universe drove much scientific inquiry. Kepler, like many or most of his time and later (and still today) saw science as a form of worship, honoring the creator by digging deep to understand the inner workings. Or, as both Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies commented, to understand the mind of God.
I’m glad you recognize intelligent people can be believers. You find it amusing, however, that when confronted with the mysteries remaining in our understanding of the universe we live in, many seem willing to jump to what you consider even greater mysteries of transcendence. I guess I don’t see it that way. The human instinct toward a belief in “something more” dates back as far as anything in human history. Belief is or has been the default position. It has been in both east and west until the Enlightenment and scientific age. The mechanistic view of the universe and the dualism separating mind/spirit/soul from the physical realm left the west with a dichotomy of beliefs.
In the west now because of the false idea that science eliminates anything not known as physical today, atheism seems to many to be the default position. Charles Taylor documents this so well in his book A Secular Age. But, as Taylor notes, we are conflicted by cross pressures. Atheism is understood by our cultural drivers to be the default, yet over 90% believe in an afterlife and about 75% believe in some form of spiritual reality or transcendence.
The question I have been trying to deal with in my Medium posts is the physicalist-atheist story about our universe what science really tells us. The more I look at that question, the more I see that no, science does not tell us that to believe in spiritual realities is foolish. If anything, it leads away from the physicalist view. But, then, that is how I see it. I know you see it differently. I’m just glad to have this conversation with you.
