Having read and very much appreciated Spencer Klavan’s first book, How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises (in fact, I read it straight through twice), I was delighted at the chance to read his latest, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, several months before it was published. The new book is, in some sense, a wonderful inversion of the first: rather than presenting ancient solutions for modern problems, it gives a modern solution to an ancient problem. But very probably not the kind of modern solution you’d expect. 

The problem to be solved is the age-old question of what the world is made of and what that means for who we are. Because, says Klavan, “when we say anything about the composition of the world, we say it in the same breath about ourselves,” and because “ideas about what the universe is made of are always, at least implicitly, ideas about who did or didn’t make it.” What we say — what we believe — about ourselves and where we came from matters very much.

Spirit and Fire

In ancient and medieval times, the world “seemed alive with spirit and divine fire.” That humans, as part of the world, should be invested with spirit and soul was only natural. The world was understood to be rooted in purpose. It, and we, had a telos.

And then came the great adventure of scientific advance. The history of science as Klavan tells it is no dry timeline of names, dates, and discoveries; it’s an epic of grand proportions, the ageless story of man’s quest to understand, explain, participate in, and exert control over the universe. Like any real adventure, the plot of our story has many peaks and valleys. These are the building up and tearing down of our ancient, medieval, and modern models of the universe, the excursions of our explorers — Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein — into what the world is made of and who, or what, therefore, we seem to be. And as Klavan reminds us, this isn’t just a story about the past. It’s our story. We’re living in it right now. 

But Does Our Story Matter?

Consider what we say about ourselves these days: That we are just highly organized, accidentally specialized bunches of atoms; just organic machines. There’s a reason we think this way. In the last few hundred years, as Klavan details, with the rise of the mechanistic view of the solar system and then the universe, and the resolution of seemingly simple substances into smaller and smaller bits and pieces, “there emerged in the human imagination an image of a world built up out of tiny unchanging objects, whirling thoughtlessly through an infinite emptiness. It was a picture of the world without a mind.” The “tiny unchanging objects,” first seen as atoms and then as subatomic particles, act according to certain mechanistic patterns. At the lowest level, physics becomes chemistry, and chemistry physics. And life, well, an individual life is really just a chemistry set. When we say the world is an accident of physics and chemistry, we say the same about ourselves. And our ideas have consequences. What inherent value is there in a chemistry set? It seems that “the more we learn about the mechanics of life, the less we understand about its purpose; the more we can do, the less we seem to understand about why we should do anything.”

Judge for Yourself

We’ve lost track of the plot, but the story isn’t over. For Klavan, this whole adventure can be saved, and we can regain our identity as central characters in the story. And here’s where things get particularly interesting: for a while, Klavan says, it did seem that science was showing us a purposeless, uncreated universe. But science now points to a universe that was not only intended to be perceived by minds, but is continually created through the communion of minds. This is the world according to quantum physics: that a mind must perceive what is in order for what is to be. I did say that Klavan offers a very modern solution to our problem. But even so, it seems rather provocative, doesn’t it? Is the light of the mind actually the light of the world? You’ll have to judge for yourself, but do it after reading this book.