His grandson Carl Wieman is a Nobel laureate, and his son-in-law Huston Smith was a prominent scholar in religious studies.

In 1910, he graduated from the San Francisco Theological Seminary and moved to Germany for two years to study at the universities in Jena and Heidelberg.

There, he studied under the theologians Ernst Troeltsch and Adolf von Harnack and the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, but they all had little impact on Wieman.

Then, he moved to Harvard to do a doctorate in philosophy, which he received in 1917, under the tutelage of William Ernest Hocking and Ralph Barton Perry.

At Harvard, Wieman became interested in the work of John Dewey, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.

"[7] In 1970, he redefined God in a way that some religious naturalists would latch on to: "How can we interpret what operates in human existence to create, sustain, save and transform toward the greatest good, so that scientific research and scientific technology can be applied to searching out and providing the conditions - physical, biological, psychological and social - which must be present for its most effective operation?