Supernatural mysteries

Michael Guillen fell in love with science as a kid growing up in East Los Angeles. His grandfathers and father were all Pentecostal ministers, but he didn’t embrace faith until after he started reading the Bible with his now-wife, Laurel, while in grad school at Cornell University. Since then, he’s dedicated his life to showing people how science and Christianity are in harmony.

Guillen holds a threefold Ph.D. in physics, mathematics, and astronomy and is a former Harvard physics instructor. He’s an Emmy-winning science journalist and spent 14 years as science editor for ABC News, appearing regularly on Good Morning America, 20/20, Nightline, and World News Tonight.

He’s also host of the Science + God podcast and bestselling author of books like Believing Is Seeing, Five Equations That Changed the World, and Let Creation Speak!

You argue modern science is facing a crisis in cosmology, especially when it comes to the debate over the universe’s origins. Why? If you go back to Aristotle, his answer to that question was, “Well, the universe that we see today is the universe that has always existed and that will always exist.” And that belief persisted through science all the way up until Edwin Hubble looked through a telescope and found evidence that the universe is actually expanding. So, as soon as we discovered that, it introduced the idea, “Well, if something is expanding, if you run the film backwards, there must have been a time when the universe really didn’t exist. It sprang into being, and now that springing into being is evidencing itself as a continuous expansion.”

That was traumatic for science, and it still is, frankly. Because after all these years, science really doesn’t have an answer to that.

Where else are recent discoveries ­confronting scientists with the limits of their own logic? We have in physics right now a very odd situation. It’s almost like Jekyll and Hyde. On the one hand, we have quantum mechanics, which has been around now for 100 years, and seems to explain things at the sub-microscopic level beautifully. On the other hand, the other personality is the general theory of relativity, and it helps to explain the behavior of the universe at large scales.

The problem is general relativity is completely incompatible with quantum mechanics. They just don’t match. Obviously physicists are very busy working on what’s called a grand unified theory, trying to unify the two personalities. No one has even come close to succeeding, not even Einstein.

What does this crisis reveal about the nature of reality? What we’re discovering in physics is that we are faced with a supernatural universe. And for a long time, physics said, “Well, we’re going to demystify this supernatural universe.” But guess what? Actually, science has been brought to its knees.

When you look at modern quantum mechanics, they are having to resort to ideas and explanations of this super­natural universe with supernatural explanations. The quantum vacuum is defined as something that is nothing and everything at the same time. Well, here we go again, this very kind of paradoxical language. How can something be nothing and everything at the same time?

When you first started reading the New Testament in grad school, the words of Jesus resonated with you because of your physics background. Can you explain why? He was talking in paradoxical terms: The first shall be last, you have to die in order to live, and you should love your enemies. No other figure in world religions speaks this way. And that caught my attention, because it resembled very much the language of the quantum mechanics that I was studying as a grad student at the time.

Then, of course, you read in one of the Christian creeds that Jesus was fully man and fully God. Well, quantum mechanics just takes that kind of paradox in stride. It is the way the universe is wired.

What does modern science suggest about human nature? Our physical being is supernatural. Our physical being is made up of particles that behave in ways that boggle the mind. Quantum entanglement. Quantum duality. Quantum tunneling. This stuff is, like, from another world, but yet that’s what we’re made of, our physical body. Now go from our physical being into the cranium. And that distinction between the brain and the mind is fascinating to me. And cognitive psychologists will admit to you that we don’t understand the mind. What’s a thought? It’s something we can’t hold in our hand, we can’t inspect under a microscope, and yet we are thoughtful beings. What is a thought? We have no clue.

You argue modern science testifies there is life after death. How is that possible? It has to do with the difference between the brain and the mind. So, when the brain dies, when a patient flatlines, they oftentimes have the most vivid experiences of their lives after, and they have no brain with which to experience these things. And this has been documented by Dr. Bruce Greyson and many, many other scientists. These are not flakes. These are very serious-minded people. They don’t necessarily have a biblical worldview, but they’re stumped as to how to explain somebody who is brain dead having the most vivid experiences of their lives.

Christianity, the Bible, offers us an explanation for what happens after we die. Its position has been timeless. Its timeless truth is, “Yes, there is life after death.” And it goes on to spell out what kind of life there is.

What recent scientific discoveries do you find most awe-inspiring? We’ve discovered in just the last 50 years that 95% of the universe is invisible to us. Let that sink in. Ninety to 95% of what we call the visible, the observable universe, is actually not observable at all. It’s invisible. Think about all the mysteries that are locked into that 95% of the universe that’s hidden from us, that’s curtained off from us. What mysteries lie behind that curtain?

Do you think scientists will discover what lies beyond it? I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see that, but I will when I go to the next life. That curtain will be parted, and I’ll understand why our physical beings are made of supernatural atoms, and why the mind lives after the brain dies, and what is behind that. What is that 95% dark matter and dark energy, the names we give to things we have no idea about? What are they, those great mysteries? As the Bible says, now we look through a glass darkly, but then one day, when we cross that line, when our essence is conserved after our physical being dies, then our spiritual being will be able to perceive all these mysteries that are kept from us in our physical bodies.