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 because he is the child who sees that the emperor has no clothes and has the courage to shout out the truth while the grown-ups are silent.

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He begins the book by acknowledging the modern consensus—the gospel according to Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, the late Stephen Hawking, and other celebrity atheists—according to which a human being is nothing but “a chemistry lab made of meat” (quoting a popular tweet). There is no soul. There is no God. There is nothing but matter, energy, space, and time. Klavan then explores the history of science, beginning where he is on his surest ground: with the ancient Greeks. Plato imagined that “the heavens were managed by superhuman regents, acting on God’s orders.” But starting with Isaac Newton in the 17th century, the heavens were “de-animated”: the movements of the planets and the stars became a matter of Newtonian mechanics, with the movements of all heavenly bodies determined by physical law, without need for divine intervention.

Klavan observes that Charles Darwin played a role in biology similar to the role Newton played in physics. Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to remove the need for God in explaining where we came from. Humans evolved through a mindless process driven by survival of the fittest. God played no role. By the late 1800s, Klavan writes,

the world was going dark. Those who reduced humanity to its material origins found themselves hemmed into a closed system, trapped in the increasingly mechanistic jaws of nature’s logic. A species that once looked to the stars for its origin and its destiny had now to scramble to find new purpose in a frozen world stripped bare of the spirit. A desperate task, and ultimately a futile one.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the first major philosopher to grasp the philosophical implications of the godless de-animated world. “Nietzsche,” writes Klavan,

kept insisting that if the outside world is simply a product of physical forces, then so is the supposed “inner life” of moral vision and aspiration. “We have spent so much effort learning that external things are not as they appear to us to be—well then! The case is the same with the inner world!”

Nietzsche saw that if there is no God, then there can be no firm foundation for morality. Moral judgments become mere manifestations of cultural prejudice, or expressions of power.

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The core of Light of the Mind, Light of the World is the argument that the default worldview which now predominates in the West—the materialist assumption that there is nothing but matter, energy, space, and time—is outdated. Klavan cites leading physicists, including the late John Wheeler, who argue that quantum physics requires that we recognize that we humans, as conscious observers, influence the universe. Physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser summarized Wheeler’s position last year in The New York Times: “every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe.” Wheeler, they continue, “conceived of a ‘participatory universe’ in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.”

For physicists like Wheeler, quantum physics introduces uncertainties which are only resolved by an observation made by an actual observer. Other physicists, instead of resolving the uncertainties via observation, have proposed that there must be an endless propagation of an infinite number of universes—the “multiverse” hypothesis—unobservable even in principle. Klavan notes that invoking unobservable alternative universes is a profoundly unscientific ploy, motivated by a desire to avoid acknowledging the necessity of an observer:

Multiverse proposals are now proliferating as swiftly as the alternate universes they depict, bubbling up one after another beyond the reaches of observation. But it won’t wash. The problem with the multiverse isn’t first and foremost a theological one. The problem is that it fails as physics. It makes a nonsense out of even the most basic claims about the universe that scientists are trying to put forward to begin with…. [H]ow can “we” say anything at all if some doppelganger version of us is always saying the opposite in some equally valid reality—if you both wake up living each morning and die unseen of a stroke every night? A man who answers both “yes” and “no” to every question isn’t saying everything: he’s saying nothing at all. A woman whose every choice fractures her into two women isn’t living in a multiverse: she’s dissolving into nothing. These efforts to erase consciousness from the origins of existence now amount to giving up on rational thought altogether, letting the very structure of language and mathematics crumble into dust. A steep price to pay for nothing in return.

The multiverse is an attempt to avoid the truth that an observer is required to make sense of quantum physics. “The human mind—that supposedly primitive and dispensable screen of illusions—is far more fundamental than was once assumed,” Klavan writes. “We do not stand outside the world to see it ‘as it really is’—we enter the world so that it can become what it really is.”

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Klavan’s book is in many ways a complement to Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (2021), which I reviewed in these pages (“The Ambiguity of the Evidence,” Fall 2021). Like Klavan, Meyer seeks to show that the latest scientific discoveries provide strong evidence for belief in the God of Judaism and Christianity. But the intended audience for the two books is different, and the strategies employed by the authors differ correspondingly. Meyer, who earned a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, tries to reach his unbelieving scientific colleagues by marshalling evidence from contemporary science for belief in a God who established the laws of physics, created the universe, and assembled the elements of life. Because Meyer is speaking to unbelieving scientists, he never cites Scripture as authoritative; indeed, he never cites Scripture at all. Klavan, by contrast, is a smart, sensible layman who has written for smart sensible laymen, both believers and non-believers, in order to clear away any misconceptions about science that keep them from being open to religion. He tries to persuade his readers that there are no contradictions between the first chapter of Genesis and the findings of modern science. Indeed, references to Scripture abound in Klavan’s book, which serve to illustrate the remarkable harmony between God’s Word and the findings of 21st-century physics, properly understood.

Klavan correctly notes that modern science has bitten its own tail. The materialist assumption that there is only matter, energy, space, and time is inadequate to explain the findings of quantum physics. He argues that the only response is to embrace belief in God. But others have recognized the same paradoxes within modern science without resorting to God. Chief among these is the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel. In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel argued that the materialist assumption is “almost certainly” false. He insisted that there must be a fifth element in the universe, which he termed Mind. But Nagel’s Mind is immanent in the universe, not transcendent. Klavan shows no awareness of Nagel or other atheists who recognize that quantum physics demands an observer, but who offer alternatives besides belief in a transcendent God.

But that is a quibble. Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World will be an invaluable resource for readers who are looking for guidance in navigating the seeming tension between religious faith and scientific observation, who need solid ground on which to stand in a culture which is increasingly hostile to religious faith.