Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith

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It is only here at the heart of Believing Is Seeing that Morris’s earlier statement about Fenton resonates: “History is always incomplete” (71).

Many testimonies of atheists online say that when they were finally able to be free of the religion it was very liberating but this man goes out of his way to say it is not. The ladder of inference explains in a simplified way that we select certain data out of the observable facts in front of us.People can arrive at the first stage of spiritual perception through reason, evidence or experience. That’s what flabbergasting me about this book, you could’ve just as easily said that faith based things- that can’t be proven- are just as likely to be real as things in science that can’t be proven (yet). Imagine you are an anthropologist coming across a tribe hidden in a remote corner of the world, meeting people who so far had no contact with modernity.

Throughout Believing Is Seeing, Morris asserts that his interest is in the complicated terrain between photography and epistemology—that is, the relationship between photography and knowledge. It had to become big enough to include belief not only in what I could see and prove but in what I could not see or prove — such as Dark Matter. Excellent presentation of what faith looks like for an atheist scientist of the highest level who is willing to challenge himself on reality and desire others to do so as well. Figure 5 illustrates how beliefs and assumptions have a critical effect on what we choose to pay attention to. One of the crucial first steps in any process that lets us learn how to think differently is to begin with questioning our own assumptions and the mental models we employ.Guillen be your guide as he brilliantly argues for a large and enlightened worldview consistent with both God and modern science. many individuals—and you might be one of them—see logic and faith as implacable adversaries and, therefore, believe they must choose between the two. It’s as if they are far more massive than they appear — like they’re bloated with some kind of unseen material that makes them spin abnormally fast. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

More recently, we’ve discovered another oddity about the heavens that is also totally invisible: Dark Energy.For Morris, the truth is (as they say) out there; the question is how to pick our way in its direction.

The implication is that if he were to discover facts that seemed to conflict with his theism, he would jettison his theism rather than question the facts. Going through such a process of conscious questioning of different perspectives in a group that faces disagreement might not fully resolve the conflict, but it will certainly help to better understand the different perspectives. Cons: Throughout the book, the author brings up fringe areas of science that are not yet well understood and are quite mysterious and uses these to imply that science is not particularly reliable, doesn’t really know about the universe, and requires faith.Morris’s mistaken claim about Sontag would be little more than a fact-checker’s quibble, except that it illuminates a central fault line in his work.