Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
125. How Cutting-edge Science Returns Us to Ancient Theology: Return of Dr. Spencer Klavan (Associate Editor @ the Claremont Review of Books | Classicist | Podcaster)
For the past few centuries, we have philosophically operated under Newtonian physics where questions of experience and of the soul were seen as subjective, with no connection to the numerical certainty of science. However, then came quantum physics.
In his new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, classicist Dr. Spencer Klavan retells the history of science and highlights the philosophical implications of each era. He argues that quantum mechanics, with its exploration of uncertainty and consciousness, has not only returned physics to the question of the soul. But, also, has provided an incredible argument for the Genesis account of creation.
You may recognize Dr. Klavan from his appearance in episode 104 - Modern Problems, Ancient Solutions - Applying the Wisdom of the Classics to the Cultural Conflicts of Today
Topics:
- The purpose of this book
- Music of the Spheres & the Medieval View of the world - the World as Beauty + Order
- Philosophical implications of "ghost in the machine" philosophy
- AI and the mechanical view of the universe
- Genesis, Consciousness, and Quantum Mechanics
- Worldviews and Science
- A clash of cultures: Scientism and Skepticism in America
- Confusing spiritual truths and scientific truths
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Dr. Spencer Klavan is an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a podcaster on the great works of the West. Dr. Klavan is a scholar, writer, and podcast host of Young Heretics, with a lifelong devotion to the great works and principles of the West. After studying Greek and Latin at Yale University as an undergrad, he spent five years at Oxford University completing his doctorate in ancient Greek literature. Check out his latest book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith.
Resources mentioned:
- Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith
- Books of impact:
- In high school: Bible
- During grad school: Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction and Saving Appearances
- Since his last appearance: Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations
Socials -
Lessons from Interesting People substack: https://taylorbledsoe.substack.com/
Website: https://www.aimingforthemoon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aiming4moon/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aiming4Moon
Facebook:
For the past few centuries, we have philosophically operated under Newtonian physics, where questions of experience and of the soul were seen as subjective, with no connection to the numerical certainty of science. However, then came quantum physics. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In his new book, light of the Mind, light of the World, classicist Dr Spencer Clavin retells the history of science and highlights the philosophical implications of each era. He argues that quantum mechanics, with its exploration of certainty and consciousness, has not only returned physics to the question of the soul, but also has provided an incredible argument for the Genesis account of creation.
Speaker 1:Dr Klavan is an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books, a scholar, writer and podcast host of Young Heretics with a lifelong devotion to the great works and principles of the West. You may recognize Dr Claven from his last appearance on the podcast in episode 104, modern Problems, ancient Solutions. If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at aiming the number four moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for links to Dr Clayton's full bio and podcast links to the books mentioned in this episode, as well as our website aimingforthemooncom and our podcast sub stack Lessons from Interesting People. Check out our latest sub stack article on the epistemological crisis of Gen Z. All right with that? Sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. All right, well, welcome, dr Klavan, back to the podcast. Thanks for coming back on.
Speaker 2:Oh, thanks Taylor for having me. It's a delight.
Speaker 1:Yes. So you published a new book Light of the Mind, light of the World, illuminating Science Through Faith. So what are you doing exactly in this Like? What is the point? You track this grand worldview creation almost over the span of science. You discuss from the classical time of the scientific inquiry and the philosophical implications of that all the way up to our modern, the classical understanding of modern physics, to quantum mechanics and beyond. Could you kind of give us the narrative of this worldview development? Where are we currently?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, when you say, what am I doing? I think, even though the story I tell in the book is vast and spans centuries, and I find it really exciting and has many twists and turns, what I'm doing is actually, I think, really simple, and that is I'm trying to clear away an obstacle that I think is standing in a lot of people's minds between what we know or want to know about the universe and what we've been told science doesn't allow. I think we've been conditioned to believe that if we want to believe in science, capital S then we need to give up anything that can't be described in purely mathematical terms, and this creates, for religious people, a real hostility toward science and a real mistrust of science. The other parts of life that need to matter for us to make any sense of things, and especially the parts that have to do with our soul and the immaterial and our immortal selves. And what's so funny about this is not only does this barrier, I think, create a real problem for people's intellectual lives, it's also quite seriously out of date in scientific terms, quite seriously out of date in scientific terms, and so what I wanted to do with this book is kind of do a hard reset on this idea of the war between science and faith, or whatever you want to call it, and tell from a very long view kind of standpoint. I mean going back to the first natural philosophers tell a serious, rigorous history of the scientific enterprise as a form of religious expression, as a way of knowing answers to ultimate questions motivated by the search for rational truth in a universe created by a rational mind meant to answer to the rational mind in humanity. And then, as the story progresses, we reach a point, sort of right after Newton basically, where it starts to look as if those larger questions about our purpose in the universe, about the creative mind that infused reason into nature, it looks as if those questions have become sort of irrelevant.
Speaker 2:And there's a famous story and we're not totally sure if it's true, but it's a nice story anyway that Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the great interpreters of Newton and one of the men who applied his ideas to orbital mechanics, was summoned by Napoleon to ask what's happened to God in your science? I don't find him anywhere in your account of the universe. And he said, mr Napoleon, I have no need of that hypothesis. And for a while that started to look like the truth. So it became a very popular assumption that you have to choose between hard physical facts and biblical faith. You can't have both.
Speaker 2:But that assumption, which was based, for Laplace, on the idea of the world as kind of a machine made out of these little objects, particles, atoms, whatever you want to call it bouncing together according to immutable laws that will always go in exactly the same way every time, that idea has actually been exploded scientifically over the last 100 years or so by quantum physics.
Speaker 2:It's made part by relativity and by the marvelous discovery that we're making that even quantifiable categories like position and space and time are not totally independent of the mind and they actually are born in this relationship between the world and the mind, which is why I call it light of the mind, light of the world.
Speaker 2:And that picture of the universe which science is now starting to describe actually looks a lot like the one in Genesis, chapter one. So science is sort of wending its way back toward pointing us toward the things of the spirit and toward a picture of the world that is much more mysterious, much more full of meaning and life than perhaps we might've thought a couple hundred years ago. But the popular assumption that science has disproven God, or that God's irrelevant to science, has really lingered as a kind of meme and got a new lease on life from the new atheists Richard Dawkins, is now being carried forward by people like Yuval Harari. Holdover that we're left with while science itself is rocketing forward into a much more full picture of the world that I think both religious people and scientific people need to take account of, and so that's what the book is about and what it aims to do.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating because, coming from a classical background, at least in primary education, in high school, you get this understanding of the medieval view of the world and at first the general understanding of the medieval concept of reality is well, you know, didn't they think that the Earth was the center of the universe and it was flat, and all that stuff. Many classical philosophers, theologians and scientists, if you can use that term back then. It's this grand vision of the music of the spheres. So I have this poster of this guy, Boethius, behind me if people have seen my studio before and it's this idea of perhaps the majesty of the universe is not just in the quantifiable area of the world. Like, you have the calculations, of course, you have Pythagoras, you have all these famous mathematicians. It's that plus faith and it's this really interesting blend that I found kind of that theme throughout your work. You use the metaphor of harmonies a lot throughout it.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah, so Johannes Kepler is a name that comes up as well as Boethius. Kepler is in some ways the Boethius of the early modern period. As you say, there is this big discovery, this Copernican revolution, that does lead to the much vaunted conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church, which I describe in the book. That too is not what you were told about in grade school. There's a lot more to it and much more profound philosophical issues at stake than just does the earth revolve around the sun or the sun revolve around the earth. But once that question is settled, at least in the order of the system that Galileo sort of inaugurates and Newton takes forward, there's this burst of new information and discoveries, and after Newton, with guys like Laplace, people start to think that that discovery was that the world is a machine. But Newton would have been horrified by that idea and actually repeatedly wrote that that was not what he was talking about.
Speaker 2:Experience of the world, the impact that the world makes on us, not a revelation of the inner workings of all reality, which must necessarily remain what you can call a cult, that is, there are things outside of us that can only make contact with us through our perception, and science is very good at organizing our perceptions and our experiences, but those perceptions arise from a larger world. And the biggest evidence of this for in fact many of Newton's critics is gravity. What is gravity? Can you touch it? Can you see it? No, you can observe its effects. You can use it as a trend line to describe the way that things will tend to move. But famously, gottfried Leibniz, one of Newton's major rivals, challenges him to say just what this thing is. And Newton says that whole sphere of questions is actually outside of my bailiwick, outside of my scope. And the great scientists of this era, like Newton and Leibniz too, and Kepler especially, all were well aware that what they were doing was describing the world as it looks to humankind, in part because they thought that was an outward expression of something immaterial and spiritual. And yeah, kepler loves the idea of harmonies and it's he who ultimately discovers the elliptical nature of orbits and the regularity of the laws by which those can be described.
Speaker 2:And in the book I talk about how this is a period of terrible turmoil in the actual world of Christendom the 30 years war, the advent of Protestantism and the collapse, really, of Catholic unity. And so for Kepler to be describing the world according to these simple, pristine laws is really for him to be reasserting that God is still the purveyor of this perfect, rational order? There was no reason for him to believe that unless he thought that the universe had a creator, as there is now no reason for us to think that the perplexities we encounter in science will have an answer unless we believe that our minds are meant to know the universe.
Speaker 2:Every scientific era is confronted with certain things that don't fit into the current map, the current mathematical models we've built.
Speaker 2:This is true even of relativity and quantum. There's a famous, intractable quandary right now about the relationship between gravity and quantum effects at the very small level, and there are things coming from the James Webb Space Telescope that nobody quite understands. The scientific insistence, conviction and I would say faith, is that when we knock hard enough against that barrier and try hard to observe and to rewrite our map and to expand it, we will ultimately land on a new order that makes sense of our perceptions. But the only reason to think that has nothing to do with our scientific observations, which are often quite confused, and the world is always providing us with 30 years wars and chaos and calamity and confusion. And it's only in religious faith, and I would even say Judeo-Christian faith, that we can make a confident assertion that no one day we'll have an answer to quantum gravity, one day we'll have an answer to space travel. These things will be doable because we are placed in the center of the universe that's designed to be known by us.
Speaker 1:Before we dive into the quantum physics and kind of the you had modern science I guess 21st century science would be a different term for today's science as well with quantum mechanics and everything involved, there are some fascinating implications which you dive into. It's kind of the heart of your book that you've built up to all the way till the final chapters, essentially, before we get there, though, what are the philosophical implications of believing that, as you call it, you're a ghost in the machine, so you're kind of maybe a human soul in this grand calculating machine of physics and of the earth and of atoms, like what are some of the things that happen because of that philosophy?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a very old idea and it's an accusation that is often thrown at people who believe in the soul, that they think it's like a sort of specter floating around, and the only people that have ever really believed that have always been materialists in some sense. Aristotle, for example, didn't believe that. They didn't think that the body had some kind of jelly or paste or ghost floating around in the body. He thought that the form and the life and the structure of the body was itself an entity unto itself called the soul. But Epicurus, for instance, thought that the soul was made out of atoms, that sort of sparkle through. They're so thin and fine that they're able to make their way past the bones and the muscle. And, interestingly, that idea of the soul, or the mind or the consciousness, as a little spark that sits in the cockpit of a Gundam, basically, or a mech, right, the way that you sometimes find it described on Reddit is like I'm a bone mech wearing meat armor or something and your brain is piloting it. Your brain is piloting it.
Speaker 2:That starts to come back right around the turn of, yeah, what we would call the modern era, which is not to say contemporary right now, but rather sort of the dawn of the scientific revolution and the on kind of in secret and doesn't publish in his lifetime called the world or a treatise on light, which is was one of my inspirations for calling this book lighter than my light of the world. This is such a beautiful title but he he has sort of this stark separation between body and soul and he doesn't think that mind can ever even really influence the physical world, but rather that God kind of brings the two into conjunction and in that book he designs what he thinks of as sort of a man machine. There's this body that has moving parts, just like anything else in the world, and there's a mind that sits in, maybe even just observes. And this comes up in Thomas Hobbes. It comes up in a lot of big names that we would know from this period, because people are right around this time, getting so excited about the things that do operate that way, that can be standardized according to these logical rules, that they start to wonder if everything is like that. And it's actually Bishop Barclay, a guy who not everybody likes very much, a philosopher that I have a lot of time for, who sees where this is all headed, because what he says is, if you have this cleavage between matter and mind, then ultimately, because people can touch matter, because they can see things so immediately before them, they're naturally going to conclude that this mind thing is just a fantasy, it's an illusion and it's part of the realm that moderns learned to call the realm of secondary properties.
Speaker 2:So Galileo talks about primary qualities.
Speaker 2:He doesn't use quite this language, but he talks about, you know, things that really are in the world, like position and space and measurable things, quantities, and then he says there's color and sound and light and touch, and all of these things are mere names, without us there to perceive them.
Speaker 2:And when you draw that distinction that sharply, what you ultimately do is you decide that everything on the soul side of the ledger, the mind, the human experience, that is all fluff, it's not real. Or nowadays we would call it subjective, which used to just mean things that we as subjects experience, but now means kind of arbitrary and not as real as this physical stuff. And I think that is the consequence of ghost in the machine philosophy. And I also think that the reason quantum physics has been so illuminating in this way is that it sort of explodes the idea that there is that dividing line and separation between primary and secondary qualities. Because even the primary qualities, the position of particles in space, turns out to be a product of the relationship between consciousness and matter. So these things are always intertwined, much as the soul and the body always are, in fact.
Speaker 1:It's been fascinating to think about this idea, this kind of modern mechanical understanding of man. It's been something I've been thinking a lot about, as we talked about off air with artificial intelligence, for example, if you believe, as I was talking with, actually, a computer scientist via email, about which is this idea that intelligence is only the computational speed that you can process new data with, and so you're like, wait a second, that has some very scary implications for you know, being a human in a world where you're creating this technology. And I mean this computer scientist said that himself. He said, essentially, artificial intelligence is just a more organized, more efficient machine and we're just this weird evolutionary kind of thing that has come about kind of haphazardly. And, um, the machine mind is really what you, you need, it's kind of charlie chaplin-esque, the machine mind of the machine man kind of thing. Um, and it's this scary implication. Then, if you believe that you are only basically a biological machine, then you have scary, a scary thing with artificial intelligence coming about. It's a huge, it's a true existential crisis.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad to hear that you're working on this because that comes up in the book and somebody who appears in the book is Alan Turing, a name people might know that there's a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch playing him One of the geniuses of the 20th century, indisputably, and a war hero, in that he figured out how to make a machine that could crack the German encryption code. But that's only where it started, because the machine he made was a computing machine, series of numbers and perform any mathematical operation, and the only limit on it was basically how much storage or memory or computing power it had. And this was. This is effectively cited as the birth date of the computer in its true form. And Turing's other claim to fame is the Turing test, which is probably the ultimate inspiration behind your computer scientist friend's assessment of humanity that the outputs of calculations are the same things as thoughts. And the machine that can translate calculations into words, images, claims, assertions, words, images, claims, assertions, or at least things that read to us like assertions, is pretending to be a human and therefore, basically, is conscious. Anything that can trick us into thinking it's conscious by mimicking the outputs of consciousness must be doing. Consciousness must be alive and that means that we are basically just primitive calculation machines, exactly as you said.
Speaker 2:And this idea starts to take shape over the course of the evolutionary era. That is when Darwin's ideas are really gaining hold, that we are first gen computers, slapdash, thrown together by evolution, with all sorts of accidents, including things like love, desire, memory, dreams, right, these are all like a fume that was thrown off, the subjective experience that we have of the world's thrown off accidentally by evolution. And when our computers get better than us at doing the calculations that correspond to the quote, unquote, real world of pure numbers and mathematics, then there will be no need for us anymore. And this is the post-human or transhuman moment. And it's why, the minute people invented this awesome toy that we have now, that can draw pictures, maybe answer scientific questions, that we have model genes, do all sorts of amazing stuff, the first thing everybody said was oh no, it's going to turn us into paperclips. Why did anybody think that that was going to happen? Only because we have this insecurity that's built into us now, that we don't know what is valuable about us except our now comparatively quite limited ability to tally up numbers and make calculations, when all of this ultimately, I think, is based on a profound error, a profound mistake. Not only is a machine manifestly not doing a large language model, is manifestly not like what we are doing, but calculation was never the essence of who or what we are. And in order to save ourselves, I think, from this rather apocalyptic doomsday scenario, we've got to jog ourselves out of this longstanding mindset that we are just first gen machines and computers.
Speaker 2:If you read Yuval Harari's book, I think it's Homo Deus, or maybe the other one, sapiens. He says at one point if we are just very carefully calibrated, electrical signal circuits that produce certain impulses respond to stimuli. The circuits travel through, admittedly, very, very complex networks, but they then conduce to our survival. This is sort of the neo-evolutionist claim that if I see a lion I feel fear. But really what's happening is all these chemicals are running through my body and all these things are happening so that I will either fight or run away and that will enable me to survive in order to reproduce. And that's all that's going on, really.
Speaker 2:And he has a passage in his book he says so. If that's the reality, why the hell do we need to feel fear? And to me this is the crux of it. Exactly Because the fact that a guy as smart as Harari can't see that? The answer to that question is because that's the whole point. If there's something there that is has no other purpose other than itself, it stands to reason that you're actually looking at something with its own intrinsic worth, what Aristotle would have called an ultimate cause, and that is our inner experience of the world which gives it the character that it has. And that's why the quantum physics stuff kind of corresponds to, I think, this really urgent thing that can break us out of our rut of thinking that our machines are better than us or can replace us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's this. So a very rough overview of artificial intelligence is it's a probability machine. You take a bunch of data and then it provides a probability in through advanced calculus, linear algebra, all that fun stuff. What's the most probable answer? And it does this with language what's the next probable word with large language models. And so it's essentially breaking reality into metrics and then making predictions off of that. And it looks a lot like human behavior, because human behavior has patterns to it, and I just find that it's a whole nother fascinating conversation. Like the limitations of artificial intelligence in some ways show kind of the limitations of this mechanical view of man, because there are some things that you can't metrify or when you metrify them that you have problems Like why? Like it gets really interesting when you start to talk about justice issues, like why is this a bad calculation versus that? That's a whole other topic. But before we go there, what is the big kind of revelation that quantum mechanics brings to philosophy in this?
Speaker 2:sense. Yeah, First of all, that's so well said that the limits of our machines, our large language models, our probability functions kind of show us the limit also of the mechanical view of man. And I think now we have been hinting at or touching on this idea of quantum physics or what quantum physics really does, and I would describe it less as a particular discovery of quantum physics or what quantum physics really does, and I would describe it less as a particular discovery of quantum physics and more as a whole revolution in science, which includes actually relativity and Einstein people don't always realize this. Einstein was very closely involved with the genesis of quantum physics and even made several discoveries that contributed to it, even though he was profoundly disturbed by it. And he was disturbed by exactly this suggestion that you cannot actually build a, as you say, metrified map that corresponds exactly to the territory of the world, that our mathematical models are always a language for predicting the outcome of an encounter between the human, I would say soul, you can say mind or perceptive apparatus or whatever, and whatever it is that's out there. And this is something that philosophers were kind of banging on about and even theologians and mystics kind of had banged this drum, Ant talks about it, Jakob Böhme, it's in Blake, it's in the romantics.
Speaker 2:But this is where the rubber meets the road, mathematically and scientifically, when you start to see that the minutest particles of existence, in isolation, without observation, don't actually have the qualities or the quantities that we want to attribute to them independently of us. And so we are. We may not be physically at the center of our star system that might be the sun but wherever humanity is turns out to actually be the center of the universe in the sense of bringing it into coherence, bringing it into some form of stability of the kind that can be described with our numbers, with our mathematics and, as I argue, in the book. This is basically what the book of Genesis has to say about us. Of course the authors of Genesis wouldn't have put it in those terms, but the idea that you begin with a mind that creates a formless void, hovers over an indeterminate structure and then generates determinate realities, including time, including location, including objects, by seeing them and evaluating them from a value laden perspective, calling it good, is actually the picture of the world that science is sort of nudging us toward.
Speaker 2:And then the moment when God puts Adam in the garden and says name the creatures and whatever he names them that's what they were called was never intended, as just oh, Adam came up with funny sound and invented the Hebrew language. Right, that's a story about Adam's role, putting the final touch on a world that was built for him to bring into its final order, and I think that that's basically what we're about and what we will be about as our science progresses, which it surely will. But in order for that to be a beautiful thing and not an apocalyptic thing, we've got to internalize the reality of our indispensable role in the world.
Speaker 1:You specifically described the moment throughout. It's in Genesis, but it's throughout the entire Bible this idea of God calling himself I am and, under this understanding of quantum mechanics, being, as in B-E-I-N-G, as the kind of the thing that connects together both physics and reality as we know, it creates reality as we know, and God being described as I am, as it was always seen as the essence of being, like the essence of reality, but now it takes on this very unique perspective with this understanding of physics. Could you discuss that a little?
Speaker 2:bit more Sure. Absolutely Well, god in the burning bush says to Moses I am that I am. It's sort of the most core, I think, instance of this phenomenon that you're describing, and some people think that the name of God actually comes out of that. The Hebrew of that statement, echia, asher, echia.
Speaker 2:That looks somewhat similar to the Hebrew name of god, and what this asserts effectively is that being in itself god as the source of all being, the ground of all being, is not impersonal but in essence and by nature, is always first of all a character, a person, and therefore imbues the world with personhood, means for it to be personal and in relationship. Now I think you need the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to really get you to the last piece of this puzzle, which is that God himself contains relationship, that reality is never actually just like a mute lump of matter, but is always in this kind of dual relationship which Aristotle, as I mentioned, sort of had already figured out before the quantum physicists got there. But running through the whole Bible, exactly as you say, there is a picture of the world that I think not only gave birth to the scientific enterprise but also is now starting to line up with the scientific enterprise in a way that we haven't even taken stock of. We're not dispensable Personality. Humanity isn't dispensable.
Speaker 1:It's actually the point of existence and it's also the basis of existence which changes everything we've covered a lot so far in this, and one of the things I want to just note because some people probably listening, who are skeptics, who aren't religious, which is completely fine and I think great, like talk about different perspectives, of course, um, we're not saying that material doesn't have a bearing on reality, like that, that of, of course, in your behaviors, chemicals and hormones don't influence you at all. I think what we're arguing and, of course, correct me if I'm wrong here is what we're saying is our modern understanding is materialism alone is what defines us, and we're basically suggesting a more Aristotelian perspective, which is it is both your soul and material and like that, that combination is what makes us human in some sense. When it talks about, when we're talking about behaviors and kind of the essence of man. What would you say to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah no question, that's important. I mean, we're definitely not saying that matter doesn't exist. That's Barclay. Barclay thought that matter didn't exist and I think part of the one weakness of his attack on materialism was that he veered all the way in the other direction, which makes sense given his position in history. The other guy who sort of veers away in the other direction from the scientific enterprise is David Hume, who says you have this whole idea that the sun has always risen over a 24-hour period and therefore it's going to rise tomorrow. And you'd think that that means there's some underlying thing called a cause, a structure that gives rise to this. But actually this is merely experience. All we have is just repeated experience, and we have nothing to say with absolute certainty that that these things are gonna. So these are examples of, I would say, radical assaults on the foundations of of science, and that's not what either of us would want to make. In fact, quite the opposite. My suggestion is that. Quite the opposite.
Speaker 2:My suggestion is that there's a good reason why David Hume probably the strongest critique of the scientific enterprise in us that we can understand we also have to believe that there is something other than matter, and there's kind of no way out of this without biting your own tail. So my perspective is much more along the lines of I love science. I can't claim to be a scientist, but I admire scientists enormously. I just think they've left themselves very vulnerable to certain maladies that we're seeing play out. For instance, if you say that science is this autonomous sort of self-generating material logic that arises automatically out of your brain, generate something called an idea, why should I believe that any more than I believe the other random concatenation of atoms or the other rather mechanical concatenation of atoms in someone else's idea that says that Jupiter speaks to her through crystals? And the answer is there is no reason. The only possibility for science is to believe that there's something that makes the idea E equals MC, squared different from the idea. Crystals connect me to the gods of Jupiter, and that difference is nowhere to be found in the structure of the atoms or the molecules involved found in the structure of the atoms or the molecules involved.
Speaker 2:So even to be a scientist, I think you have to believe in both matter and I would say spirit form, whatever you want to call it. And then you raise this entire question of values, purpose and meaning that science has to be nested in. It arose out of that context. It is, I think, leading back toward that context and if it is not in that context, it's going to attach to some other purpose besides the God of truth, like politics, which is what I think we've seen with the scientific American just endorsed Kamala Harris, as if science argues for some person.
Speaker 2:And the reason for that is without an overarching structure of values, which you can't get out of matter and you have to get out of the world of forms and ideas, science is instead going to simply become the football that gets passed back and forth between other competing value structures and political interests footnote witness the entire COVID era and I just think that, like there's no reason we don't, it doesn't have to be this way. You know we can have nice things and there's no reason, really scientifically, for us to posit In fact, there's good scientific reason not to posit that matter is the only thing.
Speaker 1:It is something, but it's in relationship with something else and then you have the other extreme that says, well then, if this is, if the base, like the other misunderstanding of science as well, then it just doesn't exist with faith, like you can't. The other extreme just reject it all um entirely, which is another kind of popular movement we're seeing as well, which is which very unique, that you have both this glorification of science not that science is bad, there's almost like religious religiosity around science plus this kind of rejection absolutely, and this is something I deal with in the last sort of concluding paragraphs of the book.
Speaker 2:I talk about the twin figures of albert einstein and charles spurgeon. Einstein, mind searching for truth, reads his Bible as a kid, grows up in a Jewish context, loves the stories in the Bible and then discovers that in material terms there are other books, science books, that contradict his Bible and concludes that since these two books must both be providing the same kind of truth, and concludes that since these two books must both be providing the same kind of truth, he has to jettison his Bible and go for his paleontology textbook. The book is designed to argue. The book is fighting a two-front war, one against the vision of truth that would make Einstein feel like he had to choose between those two things, but the other is against Charles Spurgeon, a preacher I quite respect, but who says what reason do the religious have to deal with every new airy fantasy of man evolution, these newfangled philosophies?
Speaker 2:The Bible tells us all about them, and your grandmother knows that your Bible is really the only source of truth you need.
Speaker 2:And I don't think that's a traditional Christian perspective either.
Speaker 2:Actually, if you look at, for example, the way St Augustine talks about the book of nature and the book of scripture and calibrating your interpretation of each against one another, you'll find that this whole idea that in order to be a faithful reader of the Bible you have to be a literalist reader of every sentence, as if it all describes measurable, quantifiable, physical truth, actually a very modern idea that we inherit from the scientific revolution.
Speaker 2:It's out of the scientific revolution and this turn toward materialism that the church starts to react and say well, okay, but our Bible has the real truth about the age of the universe, about the dinosaurs and whether or not they existed and all of that. And then you enter into this weighing competition between the Bible and science over which one has more physical facts, when the Bible never entered into that competition, it began hundreds of years after the Bible was written. And if you enter the Bible into that competition, you will turn people away from it, like Einstein. And so this is a real. I think both of these sides of this dispute, if you want to call it that, have, I think, a lot to answer for, and neither of them needs, I think, to be as hostile to the other as they have been percent.
Speaker 1:So we could talk about this for hours, but we have to wrap up the interview here and with the first question that we ask all of our guests what books have had an impact on you? Now, you've already come on the podcast before, and previously you said that during high school, the Bible had the most impact on you, as you were converted to Christianity, and then, during grad school, poetic Diction and Saving Appearances were the two books that had the most impact on you. Do you alter your opinion? Would you like to add to it? What is your comment upon your previous opinion?
Speaker 2:Excellent, encouraging. I definitely still feel that those have been very influential books in my life, especially actually Barfield's Saving the Appearance is a major inspiration behind Light of the Mind, light of the World. And I guess I would just add one other that I've read since I talked to you last and that is Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. Cs Lewis called this the most beautiful, almost the most beautiful book in English, and it is a century is a series of 100 short reflections which Traherne wrote during the 1600s and in his life. They were never published. He was sort of an obscure country pastor, but in their insight they are explosive. In fact Traherne seems to have basically predicted the entire trajectory of all literature for the next several hundred years. The Romantic era is prefigured in here, william Blake is prefigured in here. So far as I know, blake never read Trehearne, but when he emerged at the end of the 1800s people suddenly realized this guy had a vision and it is just such a luminous book that I would recommend really to anybody that is absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1:I'm definitely gonna, like I always create a book list afterwards, so definitely adding that one. Um, what advice do you have for teenagers? Previously you said you don't have infinite time. Therefore get serious about what you do want to do. Do you have any additions or what do you think about that?
Speaker 2:I still still agree with me. That's still true. I would like to add some practical advice for acting on that idea, which is, first of all, actually maybe. This first one is another principle, and that is all of to be serious. You don't have to be self-important or uptight in your youth and you should go and do stuff and experience the world and all of that. But you should learn that in every decision you make, you're trading one thing for another and there's no perfect trade-off in life. If I go shut down this podcast after I talk to you and I watch an hour of Netflix, that's an hour that I didn't spend reading a book.
Speaker 2:Right Now, I'm not making any value judgments yet. I'm just saying that there are always trade-offs in little things and in big things, including who you marry, where you live, what you do for a living. So that means two things. First, it means that there's no perfect solution here. There's no way. I think in my youth I spent a lot of time turning life this way and that, trying to find the perfect arrangement that would save me from missing out on anything, and that doesn't exist. So once you get that out of your head, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Stop measuring yourself against some imagined perfect version of your life and instead ask which tradeoffs're going to spend your time? And so I would propose to you one thing that you could trade an hour and a half a day for. That will repay value enormously, and that is take 30 minutes each day and devote 30 minutes to the life of the mind, 30 minutes to the life of the body and 30 minutes to the life of the soul.
Speaker 2:Pick a routine. There's lots of good ones out there. The internet is full of them. Pick a gym routine, pick a prayer routine and pick a reading routine. And stick to it every day for six months without fail. And when I say stick to it, I really do mean you're going to want to try other stuff. You're going to get bored. Just try imposing upon yourself this absolute, almost religious discipline all three areas of those life, three of those areas of life and then look back after six months and see, measure what has changed. And then, if that works for you, repeat, and over the course of four years. If you do that, you will be unstoppable. You will be so far ahead of everyone else in the world including many, many people who are much older than you, that I would count that an excellent trade-off. So 30 minutes a day to the life of the mind, 30 to the body, 30 to the soul.
Speaker 1:How fascinating. Well, thank you, Dr Klavan, for coming on the podcast. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith, One of my all-time favorite reads across the podcast and just one of the best written books that I've read of a modern writer. So thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:I'm blushing. You saved that for the end. Now I feel all verklempt and embarrassed. You've got to shut the podcast down immediately.
Speaker 1:Thank you, that's very kind.
