Michael Guillen > Quotes

“The Christian Miracle’s chief disclosure is this: the Creator of the universe is not at war with us. Neither is his favor for sale; no number of brownie points can possibly buy it. God loves us freely and unconditionally.”
― Michael Guillen, Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree

“Irrevocable processes are those whose consequences are impossible to reverse, like terrible insults whose harm cannot be repaired or the inescapable ravages of time on our bodies.”
― Michael Guillen, Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Michael Guillen, Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith

“Another plan I have is World Peace Through Formal Introductions. The idea is that everyone in the world would be required to meet everyone else in the world, formally, at least once. . . . My theory is, if you knew everyone in the world personally, you’d be less inclined to fight them in a war . . .”204”
― Michael Guillen, The End of Life as We Know It: Ominous News From the Frontiers of Science

“According to the Bible, when we choose to trust in the Lord — when we muster just enough faith to take that first, small step forward — our being breaks free of its worldly moorings and takes flight. From the resulting elevated view, we perceive ourselves and the universe in a radically new way. We”
― Michael Guillen, Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree

“And just as conventional poetry helps us to see deep within ourselves, mathematical poetry helps us to see far beyond ourselves.”
― Michael Guillen, Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics

“The production of heat is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power,” Carnot had concluded, “it is necessary that there should be cold; without it, the heat would be useless.”
― Michael Guillen, Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics

“Also, according to Christianity, following your material life on Earth, you are transformed into a spiritual being that returns to God, who is light. This transformation is called resurrection from the dead.”
― Michael Guillen, Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith

“in the realms of the super-tiny and the supernatural — we come face-to-face with truths for which we have no adequate words. Foolish-sounding truths that are paradoxical through-and-through.”
― Michael Guillen, Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree

“The young man was particularly intrigued by scientists and engineers who had discovered ways of making heat behave in unnatural ways.”
― Michael Guillen, Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics

“The Bible tells us that we are both flesh and spirit, and the two are always contending. In fact, the whole of the Scriptures is a historical account of our inner struggle between love and hate, light and darkness, arrogance and humility, knowledge and wisdom, pleasure and joy, honesty and deceit, sinfulness and innocence, enmity and forgiveness, obedience and rebellion, selfishness and sacrifice. And, in the end, life and death.”
― Michael Guillen, Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree

“By destiny I mean the unique purpose God has in mind for my life. It is preconceived by him but ultimately decided by me—by the day-to-day decisions I make”
― Michael Guillen, Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith

“Christian could argue — as I do — that science’s success at explaining the natural world rationally is guaranteed because the natural world is the creation of a rational God.”
― Michael Guillen, Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree

“So why in the world was the universe accelerating? Today astrophysicists are still in the dark about how to answer that very pressing question. But they have agreed on a name for whatever material agent is behind the acceleration. They are calling it dark energy. Some astrophysicists suggest that dark energy is a property of space-time itself, that ironically Einstein’s infamous fudge factor is needed after all because it represents a repulsive force, just the thing to cause the acceleration. Others speculate that dark energy is a new twist on the old, discredited ether; an omnipresent, repulsive material many are calling the quintessence. Others still are betting that dark energy is related somehow to the quantum vacuum, whose own weirdness makes black holes seem as ordinary as watermelons. (For more on this idea, see chapter 6.) All told, astronomers have concluded that dark energy comprises some 68 percent of the total universe and dark matter, about 27 percent. That means only 5 percent of the entire universe is visible to us!8 That astonishing revelation bears emphasizing. Everything we call scientific knowledge is based on but a pittance of what there is to know about our world. Ninety-five percent of it is hidden from us. In light of this latest bombshell, do we stand a chance of ever really understanding gravity? Astronomers are hard at work believing they can. But they must labor with the unsettling awareness that our science is 95 percent in the dark about the universe it seeks and claims to understand; about what is real or not, what is possible or not — even about a prosaic force that exists literally right under our noses.”
― Michael Guillen, Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree

“If a ‘religion’ is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements,” observes John Barrow, the eminent Cambridge University mathematician, in The Artful Universe, “then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.”[11]”
― Michael Guillen, Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith

“The world had become Newton’s family, with a few notable exceptions. Having laid Robert Hooke to rest, literally, Newton had become involved in an all-out feud with a German philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had claimed credit for discovering the calculus. (See “Between a Rock and a Hard Life.”)”
― Michael Guillen, Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics