Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with my son Spencer Klavan, no relation.
But I'm not interviewing him because we're not related, I'm interviewing him because he has written a spectacular new book called Light of the Mind, Light of the World.
There are many people in the conservative movement who think that it would be a good thing for people to find God or for society to find God because it would make people happier, it would make them more productive, it would make them more moral.
I don't believe any of that.I think the only reason people should come back to God is because God exists, and when you live in reality, you have a better life and things go better for everybody involved.
And that's essentially what Light of the Mind, Light of the World is about.It's about the fact that science, which once seemed to lead us away from God, is now leading us back to belief.
Spencer, along with not being related to me, is also one of the editors at the spectacular Claremont Review of Books, and he has a great podcast called The Young Heretics, Who are you?I recognize you vaguely.
Actually, I just live here, in this set.They box it up, they kind of fold it in, and I just sit here.Yeah, this is actually a black grotto-like nothingness that we lit up to look like we're someplace new.
Right, I've just projected into your mind the idea that this is part of that.Exactly, exactly.So this is a terrific book, and I'm not just saying that because we met once or twice before.I paid you to say that, that's why you're saying it.
But let's start with this.You are a Oxford-educated PhD.You're an actual doctor.That's true.But you can only heal ancient Greek diseases.Exactly.
If someone's having a heart attack on a plane, you're sunk.Yes, I am a doctor.
Yes, have you heard of the Odyssey before? But you're a classicist.I mean, you're a guy who studies Greek and Latin and Latin literature.What led you to write this book?
Yeah, it's a great question.And some readers will probably ask it with a degree of hostility.Who are you to talk about science, you have no expertise in this area.
And I think that is just a heightened version of something that everybody faces in modern life.If you remember in COVID, all the experts who were telling us how we had to live our lives, there was this idea that if you don't have
specifically scientific expertise, you're not qualified to think or know about anything that matters most.It's the scientists who really have absolute truth and we're all just kind of living in their world.
And of course, there's a domain in which that's true.And I am not going to be the person that resolves the paradox of quantum gravity or finds like a new galaxy by looking at the images of the James Webb Space Telescope.
That's not what I'm here to do or not what I'm proposing to do in this book.But one of the things that I think has cut people off from
religion and faith, which is really the most important thing in the world, these ultimate questions about our purpose and our place in the universe, is the idea that because scientists know about the material world and how to investigate it, they therefore have authority over all forms of knowledge, including, importantly, the interpretation of
what we know about the material world, what it should say about our position in the universe, which used to be called natural theology.
And natural theology has sort of fallen out of fashion in the church because a lot of the clerics are timid about trespassing on science.But it hasn't gone away.
It's just mutated and ended up, like everything else, kind of a province of the scientists.So you get people like Stephen Hawking, the great physicist, theoretical physicist,
thinking, believing that he has authority to pronounce not only on string theory, but on what string theory says about, say, the existence of God.
And when he does, you read these pieces he writes, you know, he used to write pieces in the Wall Street Journal saying things like, you know, well, we can generate the universe out of a few physical, a few sets of physical laws.
Wait, that's a stupid argument.That's like a bad argument that you would know was bad if you had ever thought about this larger tradition.
So what I'm suggesting in this book essentially is that natural theology is not dead and that the people who know how to do it should be the ones to do it.And that is to say the historians of tradition, the students of ideas, classicists like me.
And I'm telling in this book
I think intellectually rich and substantive, but also exciting story about the history of science, which is truly an adventure in the history of human knowledge, but which has been really badly misrepresented as a story of atheism, as if something just came along one day and disproved God.
And the true story is something very different and much more beautiful, but actually out of the quest to know God and his universe, this enormous,
array of knowledge was unlocked that for a time seemed to explain everything without reference either to God or to human beings.But gradually over the course of the, I think really 20th century especially,
the story starts to take a different turn and we haven't really reckoned with this yet.
We haven't incorporated into our popular understanding of science the idea that maybe science actually isn't just a raw material description of a world made out of chemistry sets and meat sacks.Maybe there's actually more to it than that.
conclusion of the book is that even though science and faith may have once diverged, the discoveries that we're making about the natural world are actually reconverging with the ancient truths of faith, and especially with the picture of the world that we get in the book of Genesis.
And that's been going on for a while, but it's really kind of time for us, the lay people, to reset our understanding of what science actually shows about the truths of faith.
Well, you know, it's really interesting And you say this about Dawkins.I remember Dawkins making this argument about the laws.
Hawking, yeah.Dawkins is another one.
Yeah, I was going to say Dawkins in a moment.But Hawking making that remark about the laws and Roger Scruton, the philosopher, writing in the Wall Street Journal saying, well, then who made the laws?
And I thought, we didn't really need Roger Scruton, the philosopher, to think that.Like anybody, that's an argument anyone would make.And with Richard Dawkins, too.
this idea that evolution is random and therefore we don't need God, you think, well, how can you tell it's random if you're inside the system?
You have to look outside to see the order, which it bothers me that I, a mystery writer, I feel like I'm saying these things.Now, one of the things that got me about this book is there have been people before who've said science doesn't, you know,
Get Rid of God, Steve Myers doing it over at the Discovery Institute.I've said it, a lot of people have said it, but what gets me about this book is you kind of prove it.
Actually, the depth of information about science and its development is really intense.I mean, it's very readable, but as you say, it's an adventure, but it's very detailed.Was there a time
when science actually did suggest that there was no God, or was that always an illusion?
It's funny you mention Steve Meyer, who I think is really one of the best people on this subject living and writing today, because he wrote the preface to this book.And I interviewed him on my podcast, and I asked him that exact question.
Was there some moment when it seemed like actually the world just was a machine made of atoms bouncing off of one another? And he said if there's a candidate for that moment, it's probably the 19th century, the 1800s.
And that's kind of the conclusion I came to in this book as well.If there's a villain of the book, it's the French, which makes me very happy.Of course, of course.In reality, of course, who else?Right, yeah.Qui d'autre?
But in reality, there isn't a villain of the book because
Telling the story this way and looking at science as an enterprise that really stretches back as far as the beginning of human thought enables you to see, in a way that I had not really grappled with before, that every step along this road made sense.
Every new discovery brought with it new information that had to be incorporated into our understanding.This is kind of how it works, right?We find out new data, and that's sort of the scientist's job, to tell you how the world works.
And then we, everybody, all of us, theologians, laypeople, whatever, have to incorporate that into our understanding of these larger questions, like what's our purpose in the universe, and so forth.And there was a time after Isaac Newton
hit upon his famous three laws of motion, when it suddenly looked as if the lid had been blown off the universe.And that's literally something people thought, that there was kind of a boundary where the moon was.And beyond that, the rules changed.
So the human mind might not even be capable of grasping the rules for the whole universe.
When Newton showed that actually he could explain both the motion of planets and the motion of billiard balls or apples falling from trees, suddenly it looked as if there was this huge new, almost infinite territory for the mind to grasp.
And Newton was quite smart and subtle about insisting that that didn't mean we had explained, for instance, where the universe came from, since, as you say, we were looking at the system from within the system, not from outside.
But there were others who were less cautious, among them Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the great French interpreters of Newton.And he's the one who said, he's rumored to have said to Napoleon that he had no need of God as a hypothesis.
But he definitely did say that if you knew the position and the momentum of every particle in the universe at any given time, then you would know past, present, and future.
In other words, we're just living in this kind of determinist lockstep machine world where
Your thoughts aren't really your thoughts, they're just the byproducts of spontaneous chemical, neurochemical interactions, electric shocks in your brain and so forth.
And gradually, as science became so powerful and so full of revelations throughout the course of the 1800s, you know, sort of after Laplace, in the wake of this, and Darwin too, people started to think, yeah, this is the world.
All knowledge that is knowledge can be explained by the motion of particles.And that, too, was incorporated into people's understanding of themselves.
It's almost like it's not so much these are things we think as things we feel in our bones, that when somebody says on the line, like, I'm just a bone mech piloting a suit made of meat armor, right?
That's like the wages of Laplace in popular self-understanding. And what's really, I think, remarkable in looking at the story in this book is that there's a key moment where it turns out that Laplace was absolutely wrong about this.
And it's actually just before the quantum revolution with the guys like Ludwig Boltzmann who are studying the second law of thermodynamics.This is entropy, so like gas releases into a a room, it doesn't ever come back into its little ball.
It always expands out.And this is the gradual increase of chaos.And by studying this, scientists gradually figure out that actually even the motion of particles is probably not like a machine.It's probably not determinist.
There's some indeterminacy baked in.And from that kind of reasoning, you ultimately get to quantum physics, where even particles themselves are sort of born in this mysterious interaction between human consciousness and
and matter, that we're not just one among a number of chunks of atoms, we're actually crucial elements of reality.Almost as if in order to exist, the world has to be seen and evaluated and called good.
I mean, this is where we start to creep up on a mythology, a story that looks a lot more like the description of the world in the Bible. But that has yet to be incorporated into our understanding.
So in other words, the scientific discoveries, I think, kind of race one step ahead of the public view of the world.And just as Laplace comes before the popular assumption that we're all made of chemistry
And just as, you know, it's more than 100 years after Laplace that you get people writing songs about, like, the serotonin flowing through their veins and reducing themselves to chemistry.
I think we are still a ways out from people grappling with the newest revolution, which is the quantum revolution, and what it says about our position in the universe.It's very, very different from the position of Laplace.
It's something much more mysterious.
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I mean, one of the things I like about Laplace, and I don't want to let the French off from being villains and villains in so many other ways.
Well, they do, there's plenty of bloodshed running through the streets in the book, so yeah.
But one of the things I like about Laplace is he was right if then, and if it is true that everything can be determined, then ultimately he's right.
There is no free will, there's nothing, there's not even a consciousness really, it's just a sort of epiphenomenon.But it turns out he's wrong.Right. Explain why that brings us back to a sort of more biblical view of the world.
What is it about quantum?We hear about quantum physics.It's very hard to understand.Once they start really talking about it, it's almost impossible to understand.And why does that bring us back to a sort of God-haunted world.
Yeah, this is very delicate ground.And they say, of course, that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't.I think something is a little bit different than that.I don't think it's if you think you understand quantum physics.
It's if you think you can picture what happens in quantum physics, then you don't understand. Because when you picture things, when anybody imagines something happening, we always picture it in material terms.
Even when you imagine the perfect form of a triangle, you're still drawing it in your head.And even, you know, we have concepts, abstract concepts like human.But it's impossible to picture human without picturing a human.
And this is how philosophers have known for a long time.This is how our consciousness, our perception works. If there's only matter, then the things that you can picture going on, go on whether you're here or not.
And in fact, the consciousness, the perception that you have of the world comes after the bouncing around of atoms.Atoms moving is kind of the basis of reality.And then out of that churn, we get like accidental humanity that just happens to be here.
We are superfluous, so everything that we add to reality is just kind of secondary, they call them secondary qualities.So things like color and love and laughter and like all of these things humans bring with them into the world are expendable.
And this is something that we see now.In fact, the natural next step is, well, then why shouldn't our machines replace us?
Or why shouldn't, you know, if we're a drain on the earth, why shouldn't we just kind of shuffle off, stop having babies, and let the lemurs take over, or whatever, right?
You see these sorts of arguments now being made because people think that human beings are, as Hawking also said, chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.
vision that you get when you think of human consciousness as this sort of accident and the reality of the thing as bodies in motion.It turns out. that whatever reality is, it ain't just bodies in motion.
There are many possible interpretations of quantum physics, but all of them are impossible for us to describe in terms of bodies in motion.
So there are phenomena, for example, like if you shoot a single photon, that is a kind of massless particle of light, itself a mind-boggling concept, but a single little chunk of light, basically, at something called a half-silvered mirror,
50% of the time, in our experience, it will go one way.50% of the time it goes the other way.If you don't observe it, it goes both ways at once.And I don't mean that in terms of it splits into two and it goes both ways.
I don't mean that in terms of it's a ray of light that is divided.I literally mean that one object takes two paths at one time.And I can say those words, but I can't put a picture of it into your brain, because there's no picture.
And all of these things are like this.So like, you know, where is a particle before you observe it?Well, there's a certain probability that it'll be here and a certain probability that it'll be there, but it's not here and it's not there.
It's really just, it just is the possibility of its being there.And so you can
Explain and speculate about this in a number of ways But the minute you start explaining or speculating about it the minute you that's the minute you get out of the field of science into philosophy or theology and so what I propose in the book is that one very viable way of accounting for these phenomena is that
There never actually was matter without mind, because the whole concept is impossible.It doesn't actually work.
What the world is, is just a meeting between something out there, some raw potential out there, and consciousness, which brings it fully into a more realized state.
And that sounds to me a lot like a formless void that meets with a mind which speaks it into existence and brings it finally into being by calling it good and then places an entity in his image within that creation to bring final form and structure to it, i.e.
to give it names. There's one last thing that's important about this, and that is, you've talked a bit about, like, you know, why is it that I am here writing this book?
And I actually think that it takes somebody from outside of science to see some of these things.In other words, within science, they've been on this materialist track for so long, and they've been making these particular discoveries.
It's almost like a house with no lights on. You read especially the accounts of early 20th century physics as people like Niels Bohr are figuring this stuff out.
And they're saying like, yes, you'd almost need a prime observer to collapse the wave function at the beginning of time. Neils, that's God.
And I think that there is a way in which, yes, of course, we need science to tell us about the material world, but science also needs wisdom to guide the interpretation of it.
And in this moment, it seems to me as if what's being said is the world looks a lot more like the book of Genesis than we had previously thought.
You know, I just want to notice that there is a fly flying around the, so obviously Satan has entered the building.
He's here to interfere with us.Yeah, to interfere with our interviews, it's clear.Absolutely, yeah, and he wouldn't be doing that if he didn't know it was very important that you buy Light of the Mind, Light of the World.
So if you don't buy this book, you're giving yourself over to Satan, yeah, exactly.Light of the Mind, Light of the World.There's a way in which the,
the typical believing Christian, so I'm inventing this guy in my mind, a sort of cliche of a believing Christian, resists the idea that we are part of creation.But in fact,
That is the way, in some ways, that we resemble God, that we are in the image of God, is that we sort of continue the creation, as you say, not just by naming things, but also seeing them in a specific way.
As the philosopher Kant said, we don't really know things as they are, we know things as we perceive them, but that perception is creative, it actually creates some of reality.
So explain the title, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, because I think it's different than a sort of, you know, kind of materialist version of God where, you know, it's this kind of this guy up in heaven with a long beard.
Now, no Christian really believes that, but it's kind of the cliche of what Christians believe.
Yeah, and you mentioned Kant.He was a major influence on some of the early quantum physicists, precisely because that quote that you gave describes nicely what seems to be going on in a lot of these experiments.
But the other thing you said that's really important is this idea that naming things is more than just coming up with sounds to say.And that is how the ancient
readers of the Bible and I would even venture to say how the author of Genesis would also have thought of it.
When that happens in that passage, when God brings the beasts and the birds before Adam and brings them after their kinds to see what he would call them.
Adam is not just inventing the Hebrew language in that moment or thinking of grammar textbooks he's going to write later on. The ancient concept of a name is much more profound because if you think about the fact that whenever we say a word,
one of the things we're doing is we're expressing the fact that we have encountered, we've perceived something.
So if I say the word eagle, I mean I've seen something that has made an impression upon me, and it wasn't just a stream of color and light, it wasn't just a sound that I heard, it was actually a coherent entity with form, and more importantly, something that belongs to a class.
It's one of a kind of many things.So even my word eagle, like even my basic words for material, things connects me to this whole array of immaterial forms.The concept of eagleness is sort of implicit in my ability to use language about it.St.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the great Christian thinkers, sort of cribbing a little bit from Aristotle, calls this the inner word or the word of the intellect.In other words,
The language that we use, the words that we say are just the tip of this little iceberg.And the bottom, the submerged part of the iceberg, is in us.
It's the experience that we have of the world, which is not just an experience of atoms in motion, but an experience of a whole array of form, color, meaning, and texture, and narrative, importantly, in this kind of template that our minds impose upon the world, that we can't help, really, but impose upon the world.
as Kant would have observed, we can't help but experience space and time, even though they may be totally different or even absent without us there.But because we are here, space and time are realities that are kind of built into our minds, right?
And so we impose upon the world this form and structure and meaning And the kind of modern or post-modernist idea is like, well, yeah, that's all a fiction, or that's all something we can change by exerting enough power.
If you call a man a woman, you can turn him into one.But we've learned, of course, through the transgender extremist revolution, that that's not true.
No matter how many times you try to distort language and call men women, they remain as they are, which tells us something else important, and that is our language properly used.
reflects our experience of a structure that is already implicit in the world, and it's not entirely complete without us there. but it's also not independent of us.
So the words we use, the language we say, refers to a spiritual network of immaterial realities.
Just on the basic kind of like day-to-day, getting up, talking to your spouse, having coffee, whatever, we are accessing something that is actually baked into reality. Which suggests to me that in the beginning was the word, right?
Like we have this cosmic vision of the ancient church that human language is this little echo or reflection of the deep structure of reality itself.That language is our almost closest route into what's going on with God when he creates.
And that does not mean that we are doing the same thing as God, since we can't just like magic things into existence by speaking about them.
But it does mean that this participation that we have in the universe, the fact that the universe needs us here in order to be as it is, it doesn't need us here necessarily in order to be.
But for it to be the way that it is and the way that we experience it and for all of the things that we talk about when we do science to exist, location, position, time, space, we have to be here.
And this is what I'm talking about when I say that, like, this is the world that Genesis describes.Now, you may say, okay, but that's not like what the author of Genesis thought he was talking about.And in a sense, that's true, right?
I don't think that the author of Genesis got a preview from God of quantum physics.
But I do think that he was inspired to describe the structure of reality in such a profound way that you find that structure like a template mirrored everywhere you go.And it's in science now that we are finding it again.
The fact that we are, as some might say, co-creators with God, as others say, made in his image, is actually just implicit in the very kinds of beings that we are, the very fact that we experience the world the way we do.
I mean, it's kind of like the bell curve meme, that the people were expressing something that they might not have fully understood in a scientific terms, but as we get closer to the science, you know, the bell curve meme where the fool is on one side and the wise man is on the other, and they're both saying the same thing.
And I think that as we get closer to the nitty gritty of the way things work, we find out, yeah, it was pretty much the way the author of Genesis described it. You know, it's not just Genesis that begins with light.
A lot of world myths begin with the creation of light or the existence of light.Why is it light that stands out above all other things?
Well, it's really astonishing, and I discovered this in the course of writing the book, that it's also the case that the quantum revolution begins with light.We typically, we tend to talk about electrons or subatomic particles.But yes, light is,
an essential component of basically every cosmology.And I think the reason must be because not only is it something we see, like we see many other things, but it's also the way that we see.It's the condition of our sight.
If there's no light, you can't see.And so it forces us to reckon with the fact that we are seeing.It forces us to look back at ourselves and ask, like, how is it that we're able to know anything about anything at all?Well, it's through this kind of
physical medium that nevertheless seems to convey something more than physical to us.And that turned out to be exactly what light is in the history of science as well.It's the thing that doesn't fit into the Newtonian system.
So if you think of Newton's world as a big box of space with objects moving through it, In the wake of that discovery, I mean, many things became clear.
But one thing that gradually became clear is that light in its material nature is an electromagnetic wave.And electricity and magnetism propagate together at speeds that turned out to be the same as the speed of light through a vacuum.
And so this is how first Faraday and then James Clark Maxwell are able to figure out that that's what this is.This is a wave or a joint wave of electricity and and magnetism moving through space.But nobody could figure out what it was moving through.
So when you have an ocean wave, it's a pattern of motion through water.When you have a sound wave through air, there's A wave is just a pattern of motion.It's not actually an object in and of itself.It's something that moves through objects.
And so when people started to figure out that light is a wave, they started to say, okay, well, what's the medium?
And Maxwell himself was talking about the luminiferous ether, some sort of goo or floaty gas that is all around us, but it's so fine and thin that you can't feel it.
except that all of the requirements that it would have to have are physically impossible.
You know, it's like there's kind of too many to get into, but like it couldn't be, it would have to be so rigid that we couldn't even move through it, and yet we don't even notice it moving.
And so gradually, it's called the Michelson-Morley experiment, there's a number of sort of observations that reveal that like there cannot be an ether.And it's actually this that inspires Einstein to do relativity, because he ends up saying, I think,
that this whole idea that atoms are kind of, or physical objects are like the bedrock material of existence, is what's giving us problems in visualizing light.And it turns out that light is this sort of miraculous thing.
It's a wave of energy, which is the capacity to do work.And it is, I mean, fields of energy fields turn out to be much more fundamental to existence than objects themselves.
And after quantum physics, it turns out that potential fields, the probability fields, are perhaps even more fundamental.So even the bedrock of existence turns out to be something
that is not itself material, but has the ability to kind of create the material world in our communion with it.And that's kind of why quantum physics is so unsettling, even to Einstein himself.
But I also think it's why the first thing God says is let there be light, because let there be the potential for experience, let there be the possibility of being, and then everything else kind of comes out of it.
Well, I can't believe we're out of time.I feel like we're just scratching the surface, but the book is light of the mind, light of the world.
It is incredibly readable, and just the depth of information in it is amazing, given that you are a classicist.The understanding of science and your capacity to communicate that understanding is really remarkable.I wish I'd met you earlier.
We could have had some good conversations.
This seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Spencer Clavin, Light of the Mind, Light of the World.I really, I'm not kidding, I know his father's, I would recommend it, but I seriously recommend it.
It is a remarkable book and a much-needed book at a moment, I think, when the culture is changing in this direction.Thank you very much.We will be back on Friday with The Andrew Clavin Show.
I hope you will be there, because I will be there, and who would I be talking to if you're
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