Tag: Michael Guillen

Is God an Ancient Elitist?

God and His message are hidden to so many people, but it isn’t a mystery. It is “hidden” in clear sight!

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Some people seem to think God is an elitist. Some people believe that God can only be understood by people who crack God’s code and discover access to His secrets. Another, label for this kind of thinking about God is the occult, though we sometimes put a more acceptable sheen on this kind of thinking.

This kind of thinking even creeps into churches and personal views on God. Christians sometimes give into temptations to divine the future or hidden truth in numerology, astrology, tarot cards, palm reading, tea leaves, etc.

Other people find in the “hiddenness” of God reason to doubt His existence. They argue that God shouldn’t play hide and seek with the world, that God should be obvious to all, and the fact that He isn’t obvious to all people means that God doesn’t exist.

I don’t find truth in either proposition. At the very least, neither proposition describes the God of the Bible. I have addressed the hiddenness of God several times in my writing, I don’t recall addressing the occult, much. Today this view on spiritual reality that I am describing here as the elitist view of God comes by way of inspiration from Dr. Michael Guillen.

My inspiration for this post comes specifically from a podcast episode titled, Numerology, Gematria & Kabbalah, in which Dr, Guillen spent most of his time talking about the cult of Pythagoras, numerology, gematria and Kabbalah in a thoughtful, objective way. Did you know that Pythagoras worshipped numbers? Especially the number 10?

You probably have heard of claims that the Bible is full of hidden wisdom and truth that can be uncovered with the right application of a numerical code. You will learn some interesting things if you go to the link and listen to whole podcast episode.

Michael Guillen has a personal history with numbers. At UCLA, he earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics. He went on to Cornell University, where he earned an M.S. in experimental physics and obtained a Ph.D. in physics, mathematics and astronomy. Guillen’s own “affection” for numbers gives him unique perspective on mathematics and the love of numbers.

If anyone with religious inclinations might be tempted to worship numbers, Dr. Guillen would be a likely candidate. He even wrote a book titled Five Equations that Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

One might doubt that a legitimate scientist would be so ignorant as to be religious at all, but history is full of scientists and great thinkers with particular religious leanings. Pythagoras, who headed up a cult that worshiped numbers, is an example. Not all religious leanings are the same, though.

As a young seeker and avid learner in college, I encountered religious thought for the first time in a World Religion class. Though my professor described all religions as roads to the top of the same mountain, I saw a difference in one religion and one religious text.

If you listen to Dr. Guillen tell his own story, which he does at various times in his podcast episodes, he saw the same thing. One religion and one religious leader stands out, and one aspect of that difference can be understood with the observation that Guillen makes: God is not an elitist.

We are tempted as human beings to think that truth is something that only the smartest and most clever people are able to figure out. Perhaps, this is why we are fascinated with books like The Da Vinci Code. The less religious among us might say that only those people with privilege, means, and a good education are able to know and understand truth; the rest of us are doomed to ignorance.

My thoughts today are on the former group of people. Guillen challenges the claims of people who believe that the Hebrew Scriptures contain a hidden, numerical code that can be deciphered with the right “key”. Guillen asserts that the truth of the God revealed in the Bible and Jesus, who claimed to be God in the flesh, are not hidden behind a code in the text that needs to be deciphered, and I agree with him.

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A Preface to the Problem of the Origin of Life

The problem of the origin of life is an Achilles heel, not for science, but for the materialist

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Particles of DNA strands flying through space to Earth.
Concept of the origin of life. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

Michael Guillen, who obtained degrees in physics and mathematics from Cornell University, where he studied under Carl Sagan and Fred Hoyle, and who taught physics at Harvard University, has a podcast in which he addresses the problem of the origin of life (among many other things). (See Science + God with Dr. G. Episode #44)

Guillen was an atheist into his late 20’s or early 30’s. Then he became a theist, and then a Christian. He has always been a “science guy”, however.

You can find the explanation of how he gravitated from atheism to Christianity in earlier episodes of the podcast. I am not going to address it here. I want to address the origin of life problem using this particular episode as a backdrop because I think he explains the problem well.

Before I do that, I want to preface the origin of life problem and put it in some context. The unspoken and unexamined assumptions we make can cloud our understanding, so I want to seek a little clarity first.

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Christianity’s Ties to the Scientific Method

Christianity was the fertile soil in which scientific method and modern science began to grow

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History of science, Isaac Newton and physics. The science of light, optics. Light refraction and scientific research in physics.

I have heard a number of people assert that Christianity gave birth to the scientific method. Perhaps, the first time I heard that claim was from John Lennox, the famous Oxford University professor of mathematics. I was intrigued, but I didn’t take the time to research his claim at the time.

I have heard the claim repeated multiple times, most recently by Dr. Michael Guillen the astrophysicist, former Harvard professor and TV personality. In fact, he devoted a podcast to the subject, so I took my opportunity to learn more.

I did some of my own research as well. Wikipedia, for instance, has a page on scientific method. It begins with Aristotle and focuses on rationalism as the basis for scientific method.

Properly speaking, rationalism is not a method. It is a philosophy, a way to approach the world. Rationalism and Aristotelian though seem to have helped led the way to the development of the scientific method.

Aristotle’s inductive-deductive method that depended on axiomatic truths and the “self-evident concepts” developed by Epicurus would would be jettisoned for something more like the modern scientific method beginning around the 16th Century. Perhaps, this is why Guillen doesn’t mention them.

After those early pioneers, Wikipedia mentions some great Muslim thinkers who were influenced by Aristotle, but placed “greater emphasis on combining theory with practice” and “the use of experiment as a source of knowledge”. Guillen starts with these early “flashes” of scientific method in the Muslim world, including and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) Averroes (Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd)

These men of the Islamic Golden Age pioneered a form of scientific method, but the inertia did not continue. Likewise, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), the great Jewish theologian, physician, and astronomer displayed a flash of scientific light. He urged “that man should believe only what can be supported either by rational proof, by the evidence of the senses, or by trustworthy authority”, foreshadowing a future scientific posture, but is prescience did not yet take hold.

Dr. Guillen credits Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon with the formation of principles of scientific method that “caught fire” in Christian Europe beginning in the 1200’s. “Concluding from particular observations into a universal law, and then back again, from universal laws to prediction of particulars”, Grosseteste emphasized confirmation “through experimentation to verify the principles” in both directions.

Roger Bacon, Grosseteste’s pupil, “described a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the need for independent verification”, including the recording of the way experiments were conducted in precise detail so that outcomes could be replicated independently by others. This became the foundation for the importance of peer-review in science, says Guillen.

Wikipedia mentions Francis Bacon and Descartes, who Guillen skips to get to Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Bacon and Descartes emphasized the importance of skepticism and rigid experimentation, eliminating the Aristotelean dependence on first (axiomatic) principles.

Galileo Galilei introduced mathematical proof into the process and continued to distance science from reliance on Aristotelean first principles. Galileo and Newton formulated the terms of scientific method that would inform modern scientists ever afterward.

That the two latter men were men of faith, along with Grosseteste (Catholic Bishop) and Roger Bacon, his student, is significant. So were Maimonides and the Islamic thinkers before him men of faith.

Guillen emphasizes the fact that these men who pioneered the way to modern science were devout religious believers at the same time. Guillen also observes that science did not really take off until the 17th Century. The trailblazers of the modern scientific method were religious men, and the scientific method caught fire in Christian Europe during that time, lead, chiefly, by men of faith.

Why did science catch fire in Christian Europe and not in other parts of the world? Why not in the Islamic or Jewish world? Or the world of the eastern religions? This is question Guillen poses, and he provides a possible answer.

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An Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson on Near Death Experiences: Part 1

The first part of an interview with a secular, materialist scientist who studies near-death experiences.

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In the second episode of a two-part series near-death experiences (NDEs), Dr. Michael Guillen interviewed Dr. Bruce Greyson, the Chester Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, on the subject. I wrote about the first episode in which Michael Guillen reviewed evidence that NDEs are “real”.

They really happen, and they happen all over the world, in all cultures of the world, and going back in time. We have enough data to indicate that they are a real phenomenon with certain characteristics that can be studied in the data.

In his second episode focusing on NDEs, Dr. Guillen, an astrophysicist, interviewed Dr. Greyson, who has studied NDEs for decades with scientific rigor and published many articles in peer-reviewed journals. I have linked the 40-minute conversation here:

Guillen began by asking for a definition of near-death experience. Greyson defined them by saying they are “profound, subjective experiences” that people have when they are on the threshold of death.

Characteristics include a sense of leaving the physical body and an overwhelming sense of peace and wellbeing. They sometimes include an experience of leaving this physical realm and an experience of some other dimension or realm. People often describe encounters with other entities they interpret to be deities or divine beings. They often involve a review of their own lives in detail, and many of them conclude with a decision to return to life or being “sent back” against their will. 

Dr. Greyson speculates that the experiences suggest some sort of intermediate state between life and death. All of this may seem particularly unscientific, though.

These conclusions seem like the stuff of pseudoscience or metaphysics, but Dr. Greyson grew up in a scientific household with a materialistic worldview. He had no spiritual or religious familiarity. His background is science, and he still admits that he is more comfortable with a materialist mindset in which the physical world is all there is and everything else is simply fantasy.

Dr. Greyson’s has been trained and works within a scientific framework, but he no longer dismisses NDEs as fantasy. Something happened in his life that caused him to spend the last 50 years studying the phenomenon to try to make sense of it.

Continue reading “An Interview with Dr. Bruce Greyson on Near Death Experiences: Part 1” →

Are Near Death Experiences Real?

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I recently listened to episode #47 on the podcast by the Dr. Michael Guillen in which he explored the latest scientific research on near death experiences (NDEs). Michael Guillen is a former Harvard physics professor. You can listen to the half hour episode through Spotify at this link:

I have written on the research by Gary Habermas on NDEs. I chased down a rabbit hole to follow the NDE of an atheist. I also did a candid piece on what NDEs prove and what NDEs do not prove. My fascination with NDEs continues in this article with some of the basic conclusions Dr. Guillen notes from his look at NDEs.

He acknowledges from the start that scientific study of NDEs provides few clear answers. Even defining something as seemingly simple as death has become more difficult, rather than simpler, over time. We have gotten so good at reviving people that people we once thought were dead have been brought back to life.

Most people today define death synonymously with brain death. When brain activity ceases is when death is declared. Even patients who cease brain activity, however, sometimes go on living in fashion. Circulation and breathing may continue, the body may continue to regulate temperature, and the body may continue to excrete urine and feces for instance.

Determining the exact time of death is not an exact science. Dr. Guillen calls death “the ultimate mystery”. Death has been the focus of poets, writers, prophets, and scientists for centuries. For millennia, civilized societies have built elaborate rituals around death and the hope of life after death. Recent scientific studies have begun to shed some light on death.

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