In Plato’s final treatise, The Laws, he insisted cosmology and theology serve as a necessary “prelude” to a good society. Should a people embrace the “heresy” that the cosmos has “been framed, not by any action of mind, but by nature and chance only,” Plato said, social chaos inevitably ensues. Thus the history of philosophy reveals a truly “cosmic struggle” pitting theists (e.g. Plato) against atheists (e.g. Democritus), shaping and setting forth divergent worldviews that are still very much with us. Two-and-a-half millennia later, the noted physicist John Wheeler acknowledged that “every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation.” To him, and to many others on the cutting edge of science, what’s really real is not stuff but forms. It’s information that’s at the heart of it all. There are big questions to address: Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? Does life have any meaning and purpose? Is there any Design to Reality or is all there is a random collection of subatomic bits of matter?
A few years ago a renowned atheistic philosopher, Thomas Nagal, published Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, igniting a firestorm of hysterical outrage in the secular world. Before publishing this treatise he had refrained from openly questioning the entrenched naturalistic Weltanschauung of his peers such as Francis Crick, who said: “You, your joys and your sorrows, you memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” To challenge Crick and his allies took courage, but Nagel did the real work of a philosopher—following the evidence and seeking the truth rather than tacking to the winds of elite opinion. For a long time, Nagal said, he had found scientific materialism inadequate, so he began to seriously consider the possibility that mind, rather than matter, shapes Reality.
Consequently: “My guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature” (p. 16). This is particularly evident when we turn our attention to what we know best—ourselves! “Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures whose bodies and brains are composed of those elements.” Unfortunately: “Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends” (p. 18). Far better, he decided, is the old Aristotelian conception of “teleological laws” guiding natural processes. In addition to matter-in-motion, there may well be “something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them” (p. 123). Inasmuch as consciousness, rationality and morality define us as human beings—and inasmuch as evolutionary naturalism cannot explain these fundamental realities—we must, Nagel says, open our minds to better ways of thinking and understanding the universe.
Decades earlier C.S. Lewis said much the same, insisting our minds cannot be reduced to material entities. We cannot escape a logical dilemma, he said: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms” (Possible Worlds). Such “scientism,” Lewis said, assumed a metaphysical materialism he often labeled “Naturalism,” making a simple generalization that was neither simplistic nor hasty, differentiating Naturalism from Supernaturalism. He insisted (in Miracles) that thinkers like Carl Sagan, who declared that “the cosmos is all there is or ever will be” and take the philosophical position that only Nature exists, irrationally restrict the realm of Reality to atoms moving through space.
To such questions Spencer Klavan turns in his recently published Light of the Mind, Light of the World: How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths about God (New York: Regnery, c. 2024; Kindle Edition). Klavan is an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books and hosts a podcast titled “Young Heretics” devoted to discussing great literary works. Equipped with a classics degree from Yale, he has written several books distinguished by both erudition and engaging style. He seeks to show in this book “how God reveals himself through science and human experience. It is a story about how the natural world once seemed alive with spirit and divine fire, and how it might be starting to seem that way again” (p. 15). For too long we’ve taken it for granted that the cosmos is basically a huge machine with discrete parts following predictable patterns. It’s all, as Democritus and Lucretius decreed long ago, nothing more than atoms-in-motion. We’ve done so because it’s the picture presented in the standard science textbooks used in our schools and universities. But Klavan thinks this model has “become outdated, though we haven’t yet fully realized it. The argument of this book is that our latest discoveries about the natural world do not make humanity look irrelevant or God seem obsolete. Just the opposite: the world described by science increasingly looks like the world revealed by faith. The lights are coming back on” (p. 15).
One of the lights ever shining within us is the deep desire to find order and purpose in the universe. Surely there really is a wholeness—an ordered arrangement—that enables us to understand it. Alongside that awareness is a similar conviction that “the human mind is not an accident. It is stamped with a certain inescapable structure that gives order to our perceptions, that funnels them into language and textures them with meaning, that discerns in the physical world a character of harmony. That world does not simply appear to us as a hectic concatenation of unrelated parts but as an organic whole: freighted with significance, woven through with cause and consequence, shuddering everywhere with tempting whispers of a grander harmony than we can yet discern” (p. 18). If we “can truly know anything at all—and we believe it can—then when it reaches out beyond itself it must encounter more than matter. It must encounter another mind. That is the argument of this book” (p. 19).
The argument’s actually quite ancient, beginning in ancient Greece, when thinkers such as Thales pondered philosophical and scientific matters. These “pre-Socratic” philosophers sought to identify the simplest element in the physical world (such as water, air, fire) that forms the world. They believed they could only know through sense perception. As Aristotle reported, these men focused on the hyle (sheer stuff) that mysteriously moves and makes things. But they could not explain precisely how it actually happened or what caused it. Neither water nor air spontaneously generates much of anything, much less living creatures. What or Who made things move? If there’s more to the world than matter-in-motion how can we know it? Ultimately one man, Plato, thought he had the answer—there’s a non-material, mental world that gives form and life to the material world. In many of his dialogues, “Plato’s own teacher, Socrates, gnaws relentlessly at the question of what exists besides ‘the things you can touch and see and perceive by the other senses’” (p. 36).
Klavan skillfully shows how insights from Plato and Aristotle shaped the Western mind for centuries, enabling Christians such as Augustine and Aquinas to synthesize reason and revelation and set forth a distinctive worldview. It was a world enlivened by the Spirit of God. But in the late Middle Ages some scholars began to think of the cosmos as more clock-like than organic, more limited by laws than alive with spiritual beings. Then Copernicus discerned a sun-centered cosmos that replaced the earth-centered cosmos of the ancients. His rather guarded ideas took a sharper turn in the hands of Galileo, in whom we see much that make the modern scientific mindset. Determined to make “the essence of the universe manifest to the senses,” Galileo returned to a rather pre-socratic position, allowing only material objects and causes to be considered by scientists such as himself. Mix in Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes and a new view of the world emerged midway through the 17th century. “Gradually a new picture of the world was taking shape . . . . It was called ‘the mechanical philosophy’: a conviction that the world was made of bodies whose movements and collisions were as sharply regulated as those displayed by an intricately calibrated machine. And like any machine, the world of moving bodies could be best understood by taking it apart and examining its most basic components. Suddenly the theory of atoms had new appeal” (p. 82).
Modernity’s mechanistic philosophy is almost always associated with the legendary Sir Isaac Newton, though he himself would have qualified much of it. In 1687 he published Principia Mathematica, one of the most monumental treatises ever penned, identifying “laws” governing phenomena such as thermodynamics and gravity as fundamental forces everywhere impactful. Though he basically described the universe as an intricate mixture of matter-in-motion—particles moving about space—he also acknowledged that: “God, who gave animals self-motion beyond our understanding, is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies, which we may understand as little.” Personally a devout, if somewhat unorthodox, Christian, Newton insisted “that the order he observed in nature must come pouring forth from one mind, which created and sustained the world: ‘the appearances of things,” he wrote, could reveal to human eyes the visible imprint of God’s invisible hand” (p. 87).
By seizing aspects of Newton’s work and ignoring parts of it they found uncongenial, numbers of scientists insisted the cosmos is a clock-like machine needing no divine guidance. They “led man into exile, away from the lovingly created universe of the medieval God” and declared we live in “a cosmos dominated by new powers, mindless and uncaring but wondrously reliable.” Atoms replaced gods, becoming, says Klavan, “small gods, the tiny bodies and invisible forces that would come to move through the human imagination in eternal and unbreakably regular patterns. Peering intently at their clockwork motion, scientists could hope that one day they might even rule over these mighty entities, the sons of man elevated to the status of lords among deities. The small gods were unseen but awesomely powerful, capable of exerting their will throughout the unending regions of space. They were everlasting, they were perfectly rational, and above all, they behaved. The energy that moved among them was enough to govern the world” (p. 89).
The personification of this mechanistic philosophy appeared a century after Newton in Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, who “would claim for Newton’s laws a dominion far vaster than Newton himself would ever have countenanced: practically everything worth explaining, he thought, could be explained in material terms. Here was a hinge point in the history of physics, a moment when the God of the Bible seemed to recede from the world” (p. 93). Literally everything, it seemed to popularizers of Newton such as Voltaire, could be reduced to matter and mathematical laws. This included man—“the machine” as some erudite thinkers declared. “Gradually,” Klavan says, “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” (p. 111).
Nietzsche saw what happened in this process: “‘There was a time when one looked to feel man’s greatness by indicating his divine origin: this way is forbidden now, for at its entryway stands the ape, wrote Nietzsche in 1881. Man’s pudenda origo, his ‘shameful origin’ in mere nature, revealed him as a pitiable thing of flesh’” (p. 115). If human beings are nothing but animals, as Darwinians declared, there’s nothing special about them. All the nice rhetoric about right and wrong, about meaning and purpose and God and immortality, has no standing in the ruthlessly material world of science. As material beings, it follows (as Karl Marx insisted) that history was also determined by material concerns. No longer could man imagine himself as homo sapiens! He’s homo faber, the maker, a worker shaping his environment in accord with his needs.
But just when it seemed mechanism was securely established cracks began to appear in its edifice. What seemed settled by Newton was unsettled by Albert Einstein: “‘All physicists of the last century saw in classical mechanics a firm and final foundation for all physics, yes, indeed, for all natural science,’ he later explained. But this ‘dogmatic faith’ in atomic motion, this worship of the small gods, simply could not explain the behavior of light” (p. 134). The Newtonian clock-like universe began to “slip and slide and even disappear!” (p. 135). Once we had the instruments to see inside them, atoms looked like tiny foci of energy rather than hard little bits of matter. The famous formula E=mc2 “raised the dizzying possibility that material particles, the rigid and dependable bodies whose motion was described by Newton’s physics, might simply dissolve into the sea of energy that now seemed to throb and churn beneath the surface of the solid world” (p. 136). Light, the singular constant in the universe, sometimes seemed to act like a wave—and then it looked like tiny particles hurling through space. Matter becomes energy and energy becomes matter! But what, precisely, is energy? “From the depths of Greek antiquity, from the very beginnings of science, an old question could be heard echoing louder and louder, though once it had seemed settled: just what, after all, is the world made of?” (p. 146).
Thence came the “quantum revolution” forever disproving simplistic materialism. “An entire picture of the world was being erased: the picture of the mechanical universe, with its solid moving parts churning on unseen, was beginning to fade and dissolve.” Einstein himself resisted the implications of his work, refusing to “countenance what he called the ‘ghost waves’ and ‘dice games’ of quantum mechanics” (p. 158). But he was clinging to an outmoded worldview. Following physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, “pioneers of quantum physics were forced to grapple with the possibility that their discoveries might—in the words of . . . James Murphy—‘reduce the last building stones of the universe to something like a spiritual throb that comes as near as possible to our concept of pure thought.’ Bodies in motion were not the heart of things: they arose out of a darker and more mysterious well, resolving before human eyes into the familiar shapes described by geometry. Perhaps it was only when they could be seen by a conscious observer that ‘objects’ made any sense at all. This was an ancient truth. It had been hinted at in scripture and wisdom literature all along” (p. 159).
This ancient truth can be simply stated: mind matters! There’s a mental as well as a physical dimension to Reality. Our minds—and a Divine Mind—play a vital role in our world. “The world is made in the meeting of mind with matter. This lost truth is coming back to us now” (p. 163). “And that’s why it was no accident that quantum physics began with an age-old puzzle: what is light? The very nature of the question forced us to consider ourselves. The only reason we can ask it at all is because light is something we see. That’s how we know to ask about anything: because we experience it somehow. We ask why stones fall and planets fly because we see them do it; we wonder what blood is because we feel the life draining from us when we bleed. But light has a special kind of property. It is both a visible thing, and also the cause of vision.” In fact: “Light isn’t just one of many things we see. It’s also the reason why we see anything. This simple fact has given new meaning to a very old idea: there are two kinds of light. There is the kind that we see, and the kind that makes us able to see. The light of the world, and the light of the mind” (p. 165). As the Psalmist said: “With thee is the fountain of life; in thy light we shall see light” (Ps 36:9).
Light floods the world and “it may be literally true that light holds the world together. Even in the farthest reaches of space there is a ‘cosmic microwave background,’ a form of radiation that is thought to have endured from when the universe began.” How amazing it is to find in the Bible God saying “let there be light, and there was light.” “But there is a far deeper meaning to all this. Material reality is only an outward sign of a more profound truth. It has been said since antiquity that there are really not one but two suns: the invisible one, which makes reason and knowledge possible, and its physical copy, the visible sun we see shining above us” (p. 177). The world was formed when a formless earth received illumination from a mind that saw it and named it: the claim of Hebrew scripture is that the first light did not come out of matter into mind, but out of mind into matter” (p. 178). God thought and spoke and there was light.
There’s an ancient and self evident philosophical axiom known to Aristotle: ex nihilo, nihil (from nothing, nothing). But defying all logic and ignoring considerable evidence, today’s monistic materialists declare that something—indeed all things actually came from nothing! Indeed, a decade ago a physicist/cosmologist, Lawrence M. Krauss, could publish A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing trying to show, how the universe literally came from nothing. Realizing the linguistic pit he was digging, however, he tried to re-define the word “nothing” to mean (it seems to me): “well, almost nothing,” since there’s actually a mysterious but necessarily material realm that magically gives birth to the material world. In fact, he admits, something actually comes from a pre-existence something.
Krauss and his coterie are trying to evade the implications of what has increasingly been clear: the universe came into being in an instant. Scientists call it the “Big Bang,” but Christians call it creatio ex nihilo, an ancient doctrine now made credible, for “reason itself is compelling us” to see past purely physical things, venturing into realms “behind the thinnest instants of primeval time” when matter didn’t exist. “No thought that tries to cross that barrier can carry with it any mathematical models or physical shapes, no clothes or crutches to grasp on to. The mind must go there naked, as it was made, and meet with the mirror image of itself. For on the other side of that barrier is not void but fullness, the limitless soil of being, the golden womb from whose substance the world was made. And it is not water, as Thales imagined, nor prime matter, as the alchemists thought, nor particles nor quantum fields. The world is made at last from none of those. It is made from the deep that cries out to deep, from the light that meets each mind at the threshold of existence with a servant’s silent welcome and a king’s stately proclamation, bound up together in one saying: ‘I AM’” (p. 189).
The world exists because of the great I AM. We can know it because our minds are designed to see design, to know why things are as well as what they are, to name them as well as note their contours. “When we see things, our minds give shape to them. In the most profound sense, according to Genesis, we give things names. . . . . More was bestowed on the animals that day than just sounds. The names we form with our mouths or write on a page are the tip of an iceberg whose unseen mass hovers in the silent depths of the soul. Spoken words are the final product of a process that begins, as the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas knew, in the mind and the heart. The intellect, wrote Aquinas, ‘receives a light’ from the species of each thing it perceives—that is, we see the kind of thing it is, in the way it appears to us” (p. 205). We form words because the world was made by the Word. “For the logos—the ‘firstborn of creation,’ the word that is before any written letter or spoken sound, the reason and meaning that cannot be altered or gainsaid—was infused into matter from the moment it was created. There was never just ‘stuff,’ mere objects, matter without mind. Each and every thing that was made was invested with more than material properties, suffused with ‘life, and the life was the light of all mankind. Man, in God’s image, draws forth the true character of His creation, a world not only of objects in space but of virtue and desire, longing and loveliness. We are here to give names to what the Word has made” (p. 209).
Concluding his treatise Klavan says we’re now living when both “cutting-edge science and inherited wisdom” provide us a picture of a “world spoken into being by the eternal Word and made complete by the words of his creatures, who bear his image on Earth.” It’s a significant corrective to the secular narrative, but it’s the only one that truly matters—“the proclamation that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (p. 216).