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

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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. Believing Is Seeing” is about the limitations of vision, and about the inevitable idiosyncrasies and distortions involved in the act of looking — in particular, looking at photographs. Or is it possible that reality can be perceived most clearly with the eyes of faith—and that truth is bigger than proof?

There’s a reason this book contains little or no discussion of commercial photography, fashion photography, photography as art, soon-to-be-regretted yearbook photos or iPhone snapshots. But I have to commend the author for making precise principles easy to understand through simple explanations. The book is very self-righteous what with its images focusing on Christ being the center of the world, it’s praise coming from people of faith and not solely trustworthy people from his background in academics, its all very telling before you even get into the meat of the book. For all of those who yammer that "the science is settled" on any subject in science - he offers Einstein who argued that the point of science is that it is always testing existing knowledge. Figure 5 illustrates how beliefs and assumptions have a critical effect on what we choose to pay attention to.And there isn’t much friction to slow it down—just a little rubbing where the steel cable attaches to the ceiling. One cannot help but agree, even as one recoils at Morris’s complementary statement about a photograph being “one timeless instant of time” (180). Within close communities, emotional cues like praise and shame effectively discourage antisocial activity.

The ladder of inference is a model that makes us pay attention to how we think and create and reinforce assumptions and beliefs. 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. Only in the middle of Believing Is Seeing does Morris ask a series of questions that have been foundational to historiographic and theoretical debates about photography: “While the technology may have changed, the underlying issues remain constant. At this point readers will begin to see that the confidences of positivism are shaken as Morris traverses each of his case studies.But to go so far as to teach that the Bible is illogical and teach that people should believe it anyway is going waaay too far. That's true for issues in science and issues in religion - although he points out that many of the basic stories in the Bible have lots of specific confirmations in the historical record.

Morris smartly begins the book with an anecdote that in many ways sets the tone for his project: his friend asks him, “you mean to tell me that you went all the way to the Crimea because of one sentence written by Susan Sontag?A stronger (and more appropriately humble) approach is to start with a single axiom - "There is a creator God, and the Bible is His word". Most of us will have been in situations where we found ourselves disagreeing with someone over how to assess a certain situation or interpret a certain reaction by someone else. the temporal relations which cannot be reduced to the present” ( Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed.

They include the “staging” of Roger Fenton’s famous Crimean War photographs and later that of Farm Security Administration ( FSA) photographs by Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans, the Abu Ghraib photographs of a “smiling” Sabrina Harmon (a member of the 372nd MP Brigade), and disputes over the images of “toy photographers” from the Israeli-Lebanese war in July 2006. Reliance on a social panopticon to enforce good behaviour may not seem much like the sort of trust that underpins economic growth. More recently, we’ve discovered another oddity about the heavens that is also totally invisible: Dark Energy. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang,1981), Vilèm Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator (Trans.It is for this reason, among others, that Morris missed an important opportunity to discuss art photography, creative images by photographers such as Wall or Candida Höfer. While we don't have full-blown, irrefutable evidence of God's existence in this book or anywhere else to my knowledge, we do have hints about the universe that describe how vast and incomprehensible it is to human senses of logic.