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57 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brisk Defense of Spiritual Values, September 30, 2004
This review is from: Can a Smart Person Believe in God? (Hardcover)
This small book makes some excellent arguments in defense of a religious/spiritual point of view or, as the author puts it, a Spirituality Quotient (SQ). Dr. Guillen, a bona fide "smart person" with PhDs in math, physics, and astronomy, writes without rancor and does his best to see the debate from both sides. His basic point is that the world needs more people who combine IQ and SQ (i.e., logic and intuition, left brain and right brain, intellectualism and spirituality). He shows that while science and religion are different disciplines bound by different rules, they can complement each other, with science providing the data and religion providing the meaning.
The book is slightly undermined by some shoddy proof-reading, by a few errors of fact (e.g., Samuel Butler lived in the 19th century, not the 17th), and by the author's narrow focus on Christianity as almost synonymous with religion. Although he acknowledges other faiths, nearly every example of spirituality Dr. Guillen cites is taken from the Bible. His Christian focus is particularly evident in a twenty-question "SQ test" at the end of the book, in which answers consistent with Christian thinking are always scored highest, even when other answers might be equally "spiritual" when judged by alternate traditions.
Still, in the end the book answers its own question most convincingly. Yes, a smart person can believe in God, and need make no apologies for doing so.
For a lengthier and more technical treatment of similar ideas, consider Barr's "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith."
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38 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing on almost all levels, February 7, 2006
This review is from: Can a Smart Person Believe in God? (Hardcover)
I picked up this slim book because it was directed to both believers and atheists. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to its marketing copy. "Can A Smart Person Believe In God?" never properly answers its title question and utterly fails to address the concerns of the nonbeliever. Unfortunately it doesn't even address all believers, as this work is willfully ignorant of the existance of any religion but evangelical Christianity.
Michael Guillen is an evangelical Christian who accomplished a lot in a field that usually doesn't attract religious believers. He feels this book will straddle these two disparate worlds, but all he's accomplished is demonstrating how out of his depth he is with a work like this. In order to reconcile science and religious belief, Guillen would have done well to learn plenty of philosophy, history of philosophy, history of religion, and history of science. But this book seems to have been put together with a few Google searches and a couple of lookups in an encyclopedia. He missteps left and right in invoking arguments that were abandoned more than a hundred years ago in trying to 'disprove' atheism, while at the same time admitting that most areas of religion cannot be measured scientifically.
His categorization of the different varieties of atheist were at best patronizing and in many cases far worse. While he quotes Robert Ingersoll, it isn't apparent that Guillen ever actually read his work for understanding. He seems unsure how to handle the "practical atheist" who is willing to accept a divinity should one actually manifest. And he saves his greatest contempt for the rock-solid atheist such as Richard Dawkins, labeling them Arrogant Atheists.
More than a third of the book suffers from the Argument from Authority when the authority is the Bible. Guillen never makes a case for why the nonbeliever or the non-Christian would accept the King James Bible as a solution. In fact, Guillen never addresses the existence of any form of religious tradition other than Christianity at all, which is probably the book's biggest failing on the believers' side. It's as provincial as a book on Life in the Twentieth Century only talking about New York City; yeah, it's big, but it isn't all there is.
The Spiritual Quotient is another one of Guillen's ideas gone wrong, because he doesn't seem to be able to define it very well. The scoring of his SQ test shows some hostility toward not only rational-types but again, non-Christians (not going to church counts against you). And he missed the boat by not looking into the work being done in neurology and evolutionary psychology which shows that religious ecstacy can be induced with proper stimulation of certain brain regions, or that humans may have been selected for belief in the divine as a social survival trait, whether or not any divine being exists or not.
Ultimately, the biggest failing of this book is that Guillen was the wrong person to write it. The intersection between science and religion is a fascinating field for discussion. But when a proponent dismisses atheism with one straw man argument after another, ignores the existence of most of the world's religious traditions other than his own, and treads on the field of philosophy without understanding it, the result is an embarassment that should not have been published.
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13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall good but flawed, June 30, 2005
This review is from: Can a Smart Person Believe in God? (Hardcover)
Michael Guillen, a theoretical physicist and professing Christian, has been a science correspondent for NBC News, and now serves as Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral Ministries' chief consultant for science and religion. In this short book, Guillen counters the popular notion that religion and science are necessarily at odds. The book is written primarily for laypeople, and though the author is extremely knowledgeable and broadly read, he communicates this vast learning in a simple, direct, and easily accessible manner.
Guillen introduces the idea of SQ (spiritual quotient) as the spiritual counterpart to IQ (intelligence quotient), a device that presents his view of the relationship between religion and science in a simple, memorable way. While IQ measures one's intellectual capacities, SQ measures our spiritual intelligence or capacity for awareness of spiritual realities. Though many people value one more highly than the other, Guillen argues that we need both kinds of intelligence in order to have a full, three-dimensional view of reality. He calls those who value and develop only one kind of intelligence Cyclopes. They see from only one eye and thus have a flattened view of reality.
Although addressed to both religious believer and secular skeptic, Guillen focuses primarily on rebutting secular skeptic's arguments. To this end he delineates several varieties of atheism, focusing particularly on what he calls Arrogant Atheists, those who are outspoken and condescending in their unbelief. He responds to several popular anti-religious arguments, explains the difference between science and scientism, shows the limitations, weaknesses, and failures of science, affirms the positive effects of religious faith in historical and personal health terms, and discusses some of the many brilliant people who have expressed their belief in a reality that transcends nature. This last category includes many important contributors to the history of science.
Guillen argues for what he calls a "collaboration model" of the relationship between religion and science where these two ways of knowing complement each other, while existing in their separate domains, neither impinging upon the other's territory. Though he believes human beings need both science and religion in order to have a full picture of reality, he believes that neither science nor religion as such needs the other. Science can never prove or disprove the existence of God, and our faith in him can be alive and healthy without science. Likewise, science can continue to function as an enterprise without ever acknowledging the existence of God. Guillen endorses methodological naturalism (the practice of excluding any reference to supernatural causes from science a priori) as a neutral stance, calling it "exclusion without prejudice."(78)
I am uncomfortable with Guillen's acceptance of methodological naturalism, and the way his view puts science and religion into separate watertight compartments. I see this as undermining what the author claims he is trying to do in the rest of the book, which is to grant science and religion equal status as sources of truth about reality. In our culture, the world that science can study is considered synonymous with the "real world." Therefore, methodological naturalism effectively bans God from the realm of reality. Religion speaks only to "spiritual" matters, which have nothing to do with the "real world." Interestingly, Guillen notes that according to the principle of Occam's Razor (that the simplest explanation is always to be favored), God "is fast becoming the much-sought-after simplest explanation of all."(77) But in the same sentence he writes that scientists will never be able to accept this because of the principle of methodological naturalism. This might be a good reason to discard the principle of methodological naturalism.
Allowing God into the realm of science would not need to result in automatically resorting to the extreme of offering supernatural explanations for every phenomenon in nature (i.e. lightening is the thunderbolts of the Gods). God is both immanent in and transcendent of nature, and can work through both natural and supernatural means. Biblical Christianity is fully compatible with the idea that the natural world functions according to its own laws, but understands that these laws are sustained by the immanence of God in nature. If the evidence from science would seem to point in the direction of God, then scientists should be free to consider the possibility that at least some phenomenon in nature exist as the result of His actions. To exclude Him from the start is to bias the interpretation of evidence and automatically favor certain explanations over others.
Despite this major concern with Guillen's view, I still think that on balance his book provides a good, short, accessible introduction to some of the major issues of science and religion. It effectively and simply counters some of the most popular misconceptions surrounding these issues.
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