Light of the Mind, Light of the World:
Illuminating Science Through Faith
by spencer a. klavan
skyhorse, 272 pages, $29.99
Spencer Klavan is a classicist who holds a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. Not the most obvious candidate, I thought, to write a book about science and faith that deals with such things as the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. But as I read Light of the Mind, Light of the World, my skepticism evaporated. It is one of the best books on science and faith to have come out in recent years. It is well researched, insightful, basically sound, and written in an engaging and vivid style.
The thesis of the book is that, though the progress of science from the Scientific Revolution onward led many to see the world in materialist terms and therefore to reject religion, recent developments, especially in twentieth-century physics, have shown materialism to be radically insufficient. Klavan writes:
For many the world has come to look dark and dead—like a machine. . . . It can feel as if religion is on the ebb, as if humanity is a mistake and God [an] ancient illusion. But this notion has already become outdated, though we haven’t fully realized it. The argument of the book is that our latest discoveries about the natural world . . . [make it look] increasingly . . . like the world revealed by faith. The lights are coming back on.
Speaking as a physicist, I agree entirely.
That so many people could ever have seen a materialist message in science is paradoxical since, as Klavan notes, the whole scientific enterprise is based on two facts that would be hard to make sense of if matter were the only reality. First, there is the “rational structure in nature.” Second, there is the human mind’s remarkable capacity to understand that structure.
Human consciousness seems . . . capable of extracting meaning from its surroundings. And that meaning, in order to be valid, must be latent in the whole universe. It must be threaded through the grain of all things, networked and embedded into a coherent whole that takes shape under our scrutiny. Which means the world, in turn, must be more than just debris. Order, meaning, harmony: these are more than physical things.
So how did we end up in this paradoxical situation? It is due in part to a confusion about objectivity. The goal of science is to understand the world as it is in itself and not merely as it may, perhaps deceptively, appear to us. This goal elicited the belief that we should, as much as possible, remove ourselves from the picture, along with our distorting preconceptions, biases, and fallible senses. Some took this imperative too far, leaving the human mind completely out of account, producing “a picture of the world without . . . mind.” However, as Klavan notes, science is, in the final analysis, an encounter between the human mind and the world, and the human mind is indeed part of the world and as real as the matter that the physicist studies. While these basic facts were overlooked or forgotten by many people, physics itself in the twentieth century forced us to confront them anew.
Nevertheless, it is historically the case that the advance of science brought in its wake a crude materialism that reduces even human minds and human selves to shadows of merely material processes. This view suffuses much of today’s popular culture, as Klavan illustrates with telling examples. In a Netflix thriller, a dying woman declares, “There is no me. There never was. The electrons in my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing.” The comedian Sarah Silverman announces, while accepting an Emmy, “We’re all just made of molecules, and we’re hurtling through space right now.” Many wonder: If we are nothing but atoms, what’s the point of living?
Of course, even if we ignore or discount the reality of our own minds and selves, there are plenty of reasons for rejecting materialism that are based on realities outside ourselves. Many of these were pointed out by the great philosophers of antiquity. Klavan quotes the Socrates of Plato’s Phaedo: “Do we proclaim that justice is a thing which exists? Or not? . . . What about ‘the beautiful’ or ‘the good’? . . . Have you ever grasped onto any of them with one of the body’s senses?”
Even when we contemplate the realm of matter, we encounter not just stuff but intelligible forms. And whether one conceives of those forms in terms of Plato’s “Ideas,” Aristotle’s hylomorphically instantiated forms, or the mathematical forms of the Pythagoreans (and of modern physics), they are, in a sense, “immaterial.”
There is also the ancient question of what causes matter to undergo change—a question that, says Klavan, “nagged at the minds of philosophers.” The cause must be “something more than matter,” some principle or principles. For Empedocles, those principles were “love” and “strife”; for Aristotle, they were the unconscious strivings or tendencies of natural things toward their innate ends. Klavan quotes St. Thomas Aquinas as saying, “Spirit is the first agent of all. It causes and intends the forms and motions of sublunary bodies. The heavenly spheres are its instrument.” Dante wrote of the “love that moves the sun and other stars.”
With the revival of physical science in the Middle Ages, however, a different conception of nature started to emerge. Some say it began with Buridan, the brilliant fourteenth-century philosopher at the University of Paris. Buridan suggested, contra Aristotle, that when objects are set in motion they have something imparted to them, something that he called “impetus” (and we call “momentum”), that keeps them in motion unless something else acts to stop them. Buridan suggested that such impetus given to the heavenly spheres at the beginning by God would allow them to continue moving on their own. He wrote, “One could imagine that there would be no need to propose intelligences which move the heavenly bodies, since Scripture does not say anywhere that they should be proposed.” According to the historian Herbert Butterfield, Buridan’s idea “helped to drive the spirits out of the world and opened the way to a universe that ran like a piece of clockwork.” Buridan’s pupil Nicholas Oresme—who was Bishop of Lisieux, a polymath, and a scientist of genius—speculated that God might have made the universe like a clock and was “letting it run and continue by itself.”
The great advances in mechanics made in the seventeenth century by Galileo and Newton gave increased credibility to the clockwork view of nature, as they depicted a “world of dead objects driven mindlessly through space” with the predictability and exactitude of mathematical equations.
This mathematization of physics can, however, be regarded in a very different way, for it brings out with especial clarity that the material world is based on mathematical form and thus on something immaterial. In this connection, Klavan could have quoted Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address, which refers to “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which . . . is the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature.” Newton himself regarded the mathematical laws he had discovered as ordinances of God. As Klavan writes, “Newton pointed the way up from the laws of nature toward the mind from which they must have sprung.”
Nevertheless, and though Newton would have regretted it, “an altogether different path would open up” in later years. Two features of Newtonian physics contributed to this. First, the behavior of physical systems could be understood in terms of their smallest constituent parts and how they interact with one another—a fact that many saw as supporting a materialistic reductionism. Second, the equations of Newtonian mechanics and gravity (and indeed of all the other laws of “classical physics,” which reigned until the twentieth century) were “deterministic” in character. That is, the equations controlled matter so rigidly that the world could only inexorably unfold from a given starting point. This fact seemed inconsistent with human free will, and many wondered how even God could act freely in the universe without violating the mathematical laws he had imposed upon it. Perhaps, as the deists supposed, the most God could have done was wind up the clockwork at the beginning.
The spirits, intelligences, loves, desires, and strivings that ancient philosophical speculation had seen as moving the world of matter had been replaced by the “momentum,” “energy,” “forces,” and “fields” of physics. “But,” Klavan asks, “were the spirits really gone, or just displaced?” He believes the latter, and that physicists have in effect disguised spiritual realities as material ones: “We imagine that by reducing these concepts to clinical terminology . . . we have rendered them totally material and hence lifeless. . . . But these exiled ghosts are no more purely material than the angels were.” Later in the book, when he discusses Special Relativity, Klavan makes more explicit that he regards what physicists call “energy” as in some way “spiritual.” He says, for example, that when hydrogen nuclei collide in stars and, through nuclear fusion, convert some of their mass into energy in the form of light, “they [have] passed partly through the veil that separate[s] flesh from spirit.”
Some poetic license should be granted, but I think that here Klavan may be taking a step or two down a false path. What is needed is a clear distinction between two kinds of immaterial realities, namely intelligibles and intellects. Traditionally, it is the possession of an intellect (along with free will) that has been regarded as characteristic of beings who are “spiritual,” whether men, angels, or God himself. So a thing that is intelligible but does not possess intellect is not a “spirit.” On the other hand, it is true that the existence of intelligibles presupposes that there are intellects that can grasp them (just as nothing would be “visible” unless there were such a thing as a power of sight that could see them). So the existence of intelligibles does indeed pointto the reality of the spiritual.
There is another ambiguity that arises when one speaks of the intelligible properties of matter, both those known by ordinary experience, such as roughness and hardness, and the more technically defined properties, such as energy, momentum, and electric charge. Considered as abstract concepts (which exist only in intellects), these properties are indeed immaterial. But considered as properties of material entities, they can truly be called material. These clarifications take nothing away, however, from Klavan’s point that both the human intellect and the intelligibility of the physical world point to something beyond matter.
In the last part of the book, Klavan turns to twentieth-century physics, which he argues has undermined materialism by showing that even the material world cannot be understood without reference to the minds of those who experience it. He briefly discusses Special Relativity in this connection (and in a not entirely satisfactory way), but this is not the area of modern physics that is most relevant to his thesis. The crux of his argument concerns quantum mechanics and its philosophical implications, which he discusses at greater length and with more sure-footedness. I found this part of the book quite impressive. It is one of the few discussions of quantum mechanics for a general audience, out of many that have been written, including by physicists, that gets certain basic things right.
Many popular books and articles on quantum mechanics indulge in the sloppy mystery-mongering that physicist Murray Gell-Mann justly derided as “quantum flapdoodle.” At the other extreme are the physicists who are so intent on upholding their dogmatic materialism that they ignore, dismiss, or heap scorn on the claim that in quantum mechanics the minds of “observers” play an important and irreducible role. They maintain this dismissive attitude despite the fact that this claim has been made by some of the leading physicists of the twentieth century and supported by arguments that have never really been answered.
The key point has to do with the fact that the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics (which has been the basic grammar of physics for the last hundred years) concerns only what will be found if a measurement or observation is made of a physical system. Moreover, that formalism tells us definitely not what will be found, but only the relative probabilities of various possible outcomes. By contrast, the measurements themselves must have definite outcomes. (For example, in the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” experiment, an actual observation must find either a dead cat or a live cat.) This suggests that something must be going on when a measurement is made that is not describable within the mathematical formalism of quantum physics. This is called “the measurement problem.” If, however, as the materialist believes, everything is purely physical, including both the “systems” that are measured and the “observers” who make the measurements, then everything that goes on in a measurement shouldin principle be describable by physics. Some are therefore led to conclude that there is something about observers, and in particular their minds, that is not completely physical.
Klavan could have quoted some eminent physicists in support of this conclusion. Sir Rudolf Peierls said, “The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being . . . including [his] knowledge, and [his] consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.” The physics Nobel laureate Eugene P. Wigner stated flatly that materialism is not consistent with quantum mechanics.
Thus, Klavan has good grounds for his conclusion that “the world is not made only of material objects. It is made of the meeting between mind and matter. . . . The human mind—that supposedly primitive and dispensable screen of illusions—is far more fundamental than was once assumed.” Here he sounds like Wigner, who wrote: “It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality.”
Altogether, this is an admirable book. It correctly identifies both the sources of and some of the antidotes to the philosophy of materialism, which has done so much to darken the world and the mind of modern man.
