For most of his life, Michael Guillén believed science would explain everything.
As a child growing up in East Los Angeles, he fell in love with physics in the second grade; by middle school, he was teaching himself Einstein’s theory of relativity, and by his 20s, he was pursuing advanced studies at Cornell University. Later, he would teach physics at Harvard University, earn a Ph.D. in physics, mathematics and astronomy, and become the Emmy Award-winning science editor for ABC News.
“Science was my god,” Guillén told The Christian Post.
But today, the scientist says that the same science eventually dismantled his atheism and led him to the Savior.
“The love of my life, modern science, converted me from this hardcore nerdy atheist who was a scientific monk for whom science was his god, to opening my eyes to the existence of the true God. It’s beautiful, and science does that,” he said.
His new documentary, “The Invisible Everywhere: Believing Is Seeing,” chronicles a decades-long journey from skepticism to Christian faith, highlighting how modern scientific discoveries point beyond a strictly materialistic understanding of reality.
The film arrives at a moment when faith and science are often portrayed as irreconcilable enemies, particularly among younger Americans increasingly likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated. A February 2025 report from Pew Research found that half of U.S. adults say that science and religion are mostly in conflict.
But Guillén, who has authored books on the topic, including Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree and Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics, believes the conflict itself is based on a misunderstanding.
“Modern science is not just compatible with the Christian worldview,” he said. “The scientific worldview is actually synergistic with the Christian worldview.”
The seeds of that conviction were planted early. As a teenager studying Einstein’s special relativity, Guillén was struck by the idea that reality was far stranger than he had assumed. Until then, he had lived by the motto “seeing is believing.” It was relativity, he said, that challenged that assumption.
“Einstein opened my eyes to the fact that there are actually entire invisible worlds in the universe,” Guillén recalled.
At the time, he largely dismissed the implications, but years later, another scientific mystery would prove harder to ignore.
While studying astrophysics at Cornell, Guillén became fascinated by what scientists then called the “missing mass problem.”
Astronomers observed that galaxies and galaxy clusters were spinning far faster than visible matter could explain. The solution, first proposed by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, was the existence of invisible matter exerting gravitational influence throughout the cosmos.
Today, scientists refer to that unseen substance as dark matter. Combined with dark energy, it is believed to make up roughly 95% of the universe, an implication Guillén said completely dismantled what he thought he knew about science.
“I realized I couldn’t live by this motto, ‘seeing is believing,'” he said. “It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”
The discovery launched what he called a scientific and spiritual quest. He studied Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism and transcendental meditation. Nothing fully satisfied him — and then a fellow Cornell student, an attractive young woman named Laurel, challenged him to read the Bible.
“I read it grudgingly because I wanted to spend more time with this pretty co-ed,” he said, adding that 34 years later, he and Laurel remain married.
The Old Testament, he said, initially struck him as familiar, echoing themes he had encountered in other religions, but the New Testament felt entirely different.
“It was like curtains parting and birds chirping and the sun shining,” he recalled.
More surprising was the connection he saw between the teachings of Jesus and the quantum mechanics he was simultaneously studying in graduate school.
Jesus’ statements — “the first shall be last,” “if you want to live, you have to die,” “love your enemies” — seemed illogical on the surface, he said, but quantum physics often appeared similarly paradoxical.
“On the surface, they make no sense,” Guillén said of quantum principles. “But when you dive into them, they make perfect sense.”
Both are “translogical” truths, he said, realities that transcend ordinary human logic without contradicting it. Still, that realization did not produce an instant conversion, he said, adding: “It took me about another 20 years.”
By then, he was moving through some of the most elite scientific institutions in the world and surrounded by brilliant scientists who scoffed at Christianity. Guillén recalled standing among fellow physicists at Harvard discussing the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan. During the conversation, one distinguished colleague dismissed Millikan’s accomplishments with a cutting remark.
“Too bad he was such a lowbrow,” the physicist said. “He was a Christian.”
The comment stunned Guillén.
“It almost brings me to tears telling you this story now,” he said.
Mentioning God in academic scientific circles often produced awkward silence, he said. So for years, Guillén concealed much of his growing faith, choosing, as he puts it, to “go along to get along.”
“I wish I had been braver,” he said.
That reluctance has disappeared. Today, Guillén speaks openly about Christianity on college campuses around the world, where he frequently encounters students who assume serious scientists cannot also be serious believers.
“They look at me as if I have two heads,” he said, adding that recently, a student approached him after a lecture and asked whether he truly believed the entire Bible.
“[I said] there has been nothing in the Bible I have read so far that contradicts anything I’ve learned as a scientist about the universe,” he said.
According to Guillén, college students today aren’t hostile to biblical truth, but curious and still willing to ask difficult questions about existence, meaning, truth and science’s compatibility with faith.
He recalled one particularly memorable encounter with a university humanist group whose members attended his lecture expecting confrontation. By the end of the evening, the students stayed with him for hours discussing science, faith and philosophy.
“They became my best friends,” he said. “Why? Because I treated them with love. I treated them with respect.”
Still, Guillén’s passion for sharing the Gospel doesn’t come without backlash. But when critics attack him online, accusing him of abandoning reason, he rarely responds with anger.
“My typical response is, ‘A lot of insults, no substance. Do better, my fellow traveler. I wish you well. Love, Dr. G.,'” he said. “I was once an atheist. I get it. … All of us can be used by God, if only we’re willing to be used by Him, if we’re only brave enough and surrendered enough.”
“Believing Is Seeing” reflects the lesson Guillén says took decades to learn.
“If I still lived by the motto ‘seeing is believing,’ I’d be blind to most of what’s real,” he said. “This journey that I have been on, it’s been so long and winding up and down, but it’s led me to this point. … I want to use my story to encourage others.”
“The Invisible Everywhere: Believing Is Seeing” is now available.
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]
