Bestselling “New Atheist” author Richard Dawkins famously asked: does religion turn people stupid, or do stupid people become religious? His formula—equating religious belief with stupidity—has become the default position in Western culture. Educated people don’t need religion. Religion is a crutch for those who aren’t smart enough to understand modern science. Science offers the best, most rational, most reasonable approach to all questions, so we “have no need of that hypothesis,” as French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace reportedly said in response to Napoleon asking him about the place of God in celestial mechanics. Or, as CRB associate editor Spencer Klavan put it in an essay for this magazine (“Worlds Without End,” Summer 2022), “science has displaced metaphysics and religion as the definitive story about who we are and why we are here.”

As readers may know, Klavan is an Oxford-trained classicist whose previous books include Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm, and Life (2021) and How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises (2023). His latest, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, is an exploration of the philosophical implications of quantum physics, which succeeds not because Klavan has a doctorate in quantum physics (he doesn’t), but