It’s hard to look at the culture and not conclude that intellectual secularism is in decline. When I was a teenager, the biggest books about faith were New Atheist titles like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. But now the biggest books are arguing for the goodness of belief in God, like Jordan B. Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God and historian Tom Holland’s Dominion. Sociologist Ryan Burge recently noted that the drop in the number of people going to religious services has basically stopped. And both the Free Press and The Spectator have published pieces discussing the return of intellectuals to belief in God.
Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith is the latest attempt by a high-profile influencer to show a path forward in reconciling faith and modernity. Klavan, host of the Young Heretics podcast, begins by tracing the history of science, from the ancient Greeks to the rise of materialists to the findings of quantum mechanics, which he believes disproves a purely material existence. To him this is of immense importance. As he says:
For many, the world has come to look dark and dead—like a machine. There are rumors and threats abroad that it will stay that way, that humanity itself will be discarded or surpassed by its own technological creations. It can feel as if religion is on the ebb, as if humanity is a mistake and God is an ancient illusion.
Klavan sees the rising rates of depression among young people and rising views of humanity as a scourge on the universe that must be eliminated to save the planet, or “fixed” via transhumanism, as the fruit of modern science’s saying that we’re mere “meat sacks piloting mech-suits.”
My objective in this book will be to argue that this picture of the world is grievously wrong. The chemistry set in the meat sack moving through a balls-and-lightning world is not simply an oversimplified or crude vulgar caricature of a more dignified scientific truth. Rather, the science itself on which we base our pop imagery is seriously out of date.
Klavan evokes both religious apologetics like John Lennox (showing how faith and science are compatible) and the modern trend of “re-enchantment.” Re-enchantment is the word of the moment in religious-minded circles, describing the need to bring a spiritual imagination and experience of the world—not just bare belief—back to the high-tech West. Authors such as Rod Dreher in Living in Wonder and Tom Holland call for Christians to preach the “weird stuff,” while even psychologists like Peterson employ biblical stories to aid in understanding our lives.
But these thought leaders don’t all agree on how best to re-enchant our collective imagination. Dreher thinks we should swap more analytical thinking for the more intuitive so we can interpret our lived experiences as a premodern would (coincidences are miracles, UFO sightings are demons, etc.). Peterson wants us to interpret the biblical narrative through the lens of psychology to show how we can import the wonder found in the Bible into our own lives. Dreher’s way might be described as faith swallowing science, while Peterson’s feels like science swallowing faith.
Klavan, for his part, wants to thread the needle. He uses his background (a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University) as a way of bridging the gap between the mystical and the merely psychological, the way the ancient Greeks did.
“Who are you,” scientists may ask, “to tell us the meaning of our work? … You, a classicist, an antiquarian, a scholar of bygone things.” But that is not my intention. The point of this book is not to contest or amend any particular scientific discovery: it is to say something about the whole nature and structure of the enterprise, the whole practice of seeking knowledge about the natural world, and that practice has always implicitly assumed a rational structure in nature: the word cosmos in Greek just means “order.”
Klavan’s first argument is to deconstruct the modern myth that a materialist worldview is necessary to do good science. He points out that the first people who drove science were Greek philosophers like Thales who were not materialists. And Christians like Isaac Newton certainly were not. What drove them was a belief that the universe had an underlying unseen order that could be discovered through investigation.
This is the conviction of the earliest known astronomers and natural philosophers. It was the belief of the Chaldean Sky Watchers of Babylon, by whose measures we still trace the arc of every circle, and the sages of Miletus, who hunted out the principles of matter in the growing and dying of earthly things.
While Dreher’s Living in Wonder had difficulty explaining how we could keep all the good things of the scientific revolution while getting rid of the bad, Klavan does a better job here. He argues that the scientific revolution wasn’t started by the adoption of bad ideas like materialism but by building off of the old ideas that preceded materialism.
One of Klavan’s most striking observations is that many of the materialist images we have in our heads are—quite literally—known to be wrong. When we say that “energy” and “gravity” hold the universe together and do this or that, we call a picture to our minds of electricity or squiggly lines. But any scientist will tell you that’s not what they look like. They don’t look like anything. Energy is simply the name we give for how bodies in motion move in predictable ways. This does not prove that what’s in that space is spiritual, immaterial, or divine. But it does create space for it.
In fact, reintroducing a mythical, poetic description of existence is a huge part of Light of the Mind. He refers to science as “magic, in its noblest and most potent form” and atoms and molecules as “small gods” who demand we kneel at their altar, and condemns reducing poetic descriptors of human experience like “love” to a “strange kind of chemical change,” as done in the Nat King Cole song.
Klavan’s argument is that a poetic way of talking about the world is, in fact, a more accurate way to describe it because it incorporates both the material and personal parts of our human experience. (Dreher would describe this as incorporating both the “left brain and the right brain.”) You can’t just call love a chemical reaction to describe reality; you must also call it “love.” Materialism’s flaw is it conditions us to see only the material side as “real” and nonmaterial descriptors as “subjective” and “imaginary.” Klavan, by describing reality both scientifically and poetically, is rejecting that mental habit in practice as well as in theory.
Klavan spends most of the book deconstructing the materialist arguments rather than constructing positive ones of his own. He claims that research has shown how quantum mechanics shatters the idea of a purely material universe totally independent of human consciousness and perception, because the measurements we use to do science don’t technically tell us about reality outside our perception of it. (For example, “motion” and “location” and “measurement” are impossible to talk about or make equations for outside the realm of a conscious measurer, much to the chagrin of figures like Einstein and Schrödinger.)
What reality does exist independently of us is, nevertheless, in some way shaped by human conscience. As Klavan tells it, experiments show how particles are not in a particular place before they are observed by a human person. When they are left on their own in material space, before a human with the power of self-awareness and perception is introduced into the picture, fundamental parts of reality are, in a sense, pure potential. But when a human mind grasps them, they become actualized as some thing. In Klavan’s account, quite literally a multiverse of future potential exists before a human turns attention to it. Then, when one human does see it, all that potential collapses into one thing. He concludes that this means our conscious minds—our spirits, our souls—are real in a tangible way and have a concrete effect on the universe.
This is certainly intuitively correct, fitting our experience of the world and taking it to cosmic levels. (“As above, so below. On earth as it is in heaven.”) We start out in the world with infinite possibilities and then—through our thoughts and actions—we take all the possibilities and create the actual reality that we and others all live in.
Klavan also makes a persuasive case that the insistence by scientists on positing a purely materialist account of this phenomenon causes them to tie themselves in knots. He alludes to the multiverse theory as an example. If our perception of things can’t possibly change reality, then it must be that it only appears to us like it changed, when really all the other possibilities in fact also took place, just in other universes. This is where we get the “if you made one choice there’s another universe where you made another one” that so many movies and shows today rely upon. Yet this largely amounts to explaining away what we observe in the world rather than explaining it. And it’s that very “explaining away” that makes life seem less meaningful, not more, as explored in multiverse-heavy media like Rick and Morty and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
And to be both obvious and honest, there’s also something deeply dignifying in Klavan’s description of reality: It’s one where humans are powerful and important. We’re powerful because our presence shapes reality. We’re important because, without us, all of life is merely potential. When we live in the world and make choices, we are literally shaping our world—not just on an individual level but on a cosmic one, too. If Rick and Morty’s story makes us mere ants, Klavan’s story makes us kings.
Klavan struggles, however, to make coherent any further implications of these ideas. How does this view of reality make it more likely we will better navigate the world, not just feel better about our place in it? How does it make it easier to perform scientific experiments, make more discoveries, and build better inventions? Despite Klavan’s insistence that materialism wasn’t the driving force behind the growth in science, he repeatedly shows that scientists who leaned toward the idea of a universe independent of our perception pushed our knowledge forward. How does Klavan’s new framework do that with equal force?
It seems as if he’s trying to have it both ways: a world so subjective that we need human perception to make it real, but sufficiently objective that all our measurements are reliable enough to make scientific progress possible. So our perceptions “create” reality just enough to make us important, but not so much that “reality” is totally subjective (like the relativists say) or that we can control it with our thoughts (like witches say). But whenever Klavan tries to explain how this works, he ends up speculating: for example, that the first person who sees something determines its reality—by his perception, not his will—for everyone else for all time. These musings seem less like an adventurer exploring a new world and more like a desperate man trying to force together nonsense with duct tape.
Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World is a valuable contribution to the project of reincorporating meaning into modernity. His arguments that a sacred view of human life is more compatible with science than nihilistic materialism will likely be foundational for many going forward. And his commitment to both reason and faith makes his guide more reliable than those of some of his contemporaries. But it will take others either to build on or subvert his framework in ways that make this marriage between the two practical and not just theoretical.
