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

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Pros: I liked that a respectable scientist shares about his Christian faith and tells the story of how he came to believe. Being able to question our own assumptions and paying attention to how we think and interpret situations is a crucial skill for anybody in a leadership position, and anybody wanting to co-create a regenerative culture.

Even the systems view itself is only a map — a way of seeing relationships and interactions more clearly depending on how we define ‘the system in question’. I still find it a worthwhile read, though I might just skip the last chapter: I definitely appreciate his ability to make scientific concepts accessible, and it made me regard our world, the sciences, and God with more appreciation and awe. As the de facto protagonist of his own book, Morris reminds me of no one so much as Sherlock Holmes, for whom private investigation was a form of practical epistemology. In “Believing Is Seeing,” Morris explores and refines our most basic way of understanding the world, which is also a plea for attention, an invitation to communal experience, an expression of urgency, an exclamation of wonder and one of our first, most important and most enduring requests of each other: Look!stars for some interesting ideas, 2 stars for a lack of style and sometimes a lack of substance, and 1 star for transphobia.

Temporal relations are never seen in ordinary perception, but they can be seen in the image, provided the image is creative. Not only do many of today’s young people equate opinion with fact, but they also believe that opinions and feelings are more important than facts and that faith is like an ugly four-letter word. As it happens, she never claimed that Fenton “moved the cannonballs to telegraph the horrors of war.The members of the tribe would not see the equipment you are carrying, like your camera, your mobile phone, or the glasses you might be wearing, in the same way that you or I would perceive those objects. Even if Sontag is right, namely, that Fenton moved the cannonballs to telegraph the horrors of war, what’s so bad about that? The inclusion of a few personal revelatory spiritual experiences was an interesting deviation from the largely academic discussion and was a highlight of the book for me.

Reality shows up in diverse ways depending on the way of thinking and the way of seeing we employ, and the mental models we use to make sense of what we observe.As a pious scientific monk — a liberated, free-thinking Atheist — I lived the by the trusty adage that seeing is believing. It turns out that Morris has been instructing us in a method: getting us accustomed, on the benign turf of the past, to “thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography — about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence — about the relationship between photographs and reality. It should be noted that the King James version is considered blasphemous because it was edited and rewritten by King James.

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.He briefly touches on other religions and explains that he studied those and arrived at Christianity as the religion that meshed best with his worldview and understanding of science. There (almost annoyingly) was a sense of profound logic that I could not ignore, though, about Christianity that I felt Christians were not as interested in. 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. While these types of statements are common in documentary films, serving to summarize a complex subject or individual, they can sound trite in a book that asks to be read in the fields of art history, visual culture studies, anthropology, and philosophy. We get odd, absorbing pictures of Mayan ruins, of Picasso and his mistress, of the high heels worn by Morris’s tour guide in Crimea: shanks, shoes, a shadow (presumably the photographer’s) falling across the once boot-trodden road.