In an age in which broad agreement is alarmingly scarce, there’s little question that most people in the West do share a similar conception of the workings of the universe. Whether they delve into it as a matter of serious study or as a piece of implicit common sense, most look upon the fruits of the scientific revolution as having revealed to us a machinelike universe of moving parts—an indifferent clockwork of atoms, molecules, cells, planets, and so on.

This view renders man as just another material component of the world, composed in turn of mechanical parts. Those parts, too, can be broken down into smaller bits of machinery. And while the 16th-century scientists who first sought to figure out the underpinnings of the universe did so in part to reveal the perfection of God’s design, the revolution they spurred would eventually dispense with God altogether. Or rather, it would replace Him with the microscopically “small gods” that make up everything we see, hear, touch, smell, and feel: atoms.

As with much that becomes conventional wisdom, the materialist view is probably quite wrong. It turns out, according to polymath writer, podcaster, and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books Spencer A. Klavan, “the science itself on which we base our pop imagery is seriously out of date.” In Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Klavan makes the case that “the world described by science is now looking more and more like the God-ordained universe revealed in our ancient scriptures.” But beyond that, Klavan sees in the workings of quantum mechanics evidence of a universe not only created for man to behold but created as a result of man’s beholding it.

It’s a claim as tantalizing and inherently contradictory as the mysteries of quantum mechanics itself. But before Klavan gets to his ultimate argument, he takes readers through the history of scientific and natural inquiry, from the ancients to the present. And here he renders a beautiful story of the coupling and uncoupling of science and faith.

The pre-Platonic philosophers had varying theories of what constituted the main elements of the universe, but, as Aristotle later said, they all “thought that the sources of everything belonged only to the category of matter.” By the time Plato got around to defining “the just,” “the beautiful,” and “the good,” philosophers came to understand that there were things in this world—indeed, the main things—that could not be accessed directly with the senses. Aristotle believed that physical forms are infused with immaterial natures that set them in motion. Thomas Aquinas and others would go on to expand this idea in religious directions, speculating further about the spirit that moved the objects of the universe.

Beginning in the 14th century, questions about observed reality, such as the projectile motion of arrows, challenged the Aristotelian view. If the force of a bowstring moved an arrow, then the arrow did not move as a function of its nature. “It’s true enough,” writes Klavan, “that the world was starting to look more mechanical.”

Yet in the 16th century, Copernicus revolutionized astronomy partially to restore an appreciation of God’s exquisite handiwork. Earlier astronomers had offered competing geocentric models of the heavens, all requiring endless patch-ups and half-successful reconciliations. Copernicus sought to clean up this growing mess with his suggestion that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. Heliocentrism, writes Klavan, was “theologically dignified.” Galileo would use telescopes to confirm that it was also true. But, alas, the Church
famously deemed his claim “contrary to the Holy Scriptures,” in which the sun is described as moving east to west. During and after the Thirty Years’ War, as Christendom split ap-art, heliocentrism would win the day.

It was Isaac Newton who, in 1687, linked the movements of the heavenly bodies to the movements of objects on earth with his three laws of motion and his discovery of gravity. While Newton was a man of unimpeachable Christian faith, his contribution unwittingly advanced the idea of a mechanized universe. And over the next two centuries, discoveries about the molecular structure of elements would push this notion into the tiniest crevices of existence.

By the time Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the educated world had been primed to understand the appearance of man on earth as a kind of accidental process of nature with no need of a creator or tender. From there, it was hardly a leap at all to see the brain as just another apparatus whose functioning was nothing more than the interaction of atoms. “It started to seem to the worshippers of the small gods,” Klavan writes, “as if reflection and choice were fictions, representing the patient’s dim awareness of a biological machinery that only happened to toss up ideas as by-pro-ducts.”

And then, beginning in the 19th century, and stretching to this day, scientists began to discover that reality was far stranger, less mechanized, and thoroughly less predictable than had been supposed by those who had presumed to conquer nature’s ambiguities. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell uncovered a world of electrical and magnetic fields that weren’t governed by Newtonian laws about the movements of objects. Albert Einstein would assert—and he would be proven correct—that time and space shrink and dilate to accommodate the invariant speed of light and that gravity isn’t so much a force as it is an element of the very fabric of space. It was Einstein, too, who first pointed the way to quantum physics, though skeptically, by noting that light is made up of discrete photons.

The giants of quantum physics—Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Hendrik Lorentz, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others—observed that the subatomic world is teeming with behavior so strange that it doesn’t merely defy Newton’s laws; it defies human attempts at comprehension entirely.

We have equations to describe the behavior of particles at the quantum level. But we lack the language to characterize or interpret such behavior because we can’t even picture what we’d be characterizing. For example, we do not have the mental apparatus to visualize, or even perceive, what it means to find a proton “making two rotations in one, spinning twice rather than once before it ends up for the first time back at its original angle.” It’s worth reading that quote again slowly and trying to imagine what it describes. If something spins around twice, how can it end up at its starting point only at the conclusion of the second spin? Wasn’t it there at the end of the first, too? No, it wasn’t. That’s what it means. And it makes no sense based on our normal experience of the physical world.

Quantum mechanics is full of such experimentally verified impossibilities: electrons “that slip from one place to another without occupying any of the locations in between,” a photon that “collide[s] with itself,” and particles that behave as waves until you observe them.

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It is on this last point that Klavan largely rests his primary thesis. It goes like this: The quantum wave function describes a range of possibilities that subatomic particles could resolve themselves into once they are observed. But in order to resolve themselves as particles, they must be observed; observation instantly collapses the wave function and sets the particle in a defined place in the universe. This means, for Klavan, first, that observation is a necessarily collaborative element in the creation of all things. “We do not stand outside the world to see it ‘as it really is,’” he writes, “we enter the world so that it can become what it really is.”

But he makes a deeper point here about the origins of the universe: By his reasoning, it would have taken an observer to make the mere quantum potential of the Big Bang into a reality. Otherwise, the entire contents of the universe would have remained suspended in superposition, like unobserved particles. That observer, believes Klavan, was the Creator; and what it means for man to be made in His image is for us to do our part to observe things into existence and pronounce them as good.

It’s a bold and beguiling idea, and Klavan brings it together subtly and slowly. He writes in a sweeping operatic register that matches the grandness of his subject, weaving in Genesis and Proverbs and the physicist John Wheeler’s assertion that what humans observe even changes the past of the observed object. His book, in other words, is a sublime feast of theology, history, science, and philosophy offered up to reassert man’s communion with God.

But is he ultimately correct? The most you can say is that the science is never settled. It is, in fact, fractious and fluid. There are physicists who hold that, while it seems that observation does collapse the probability wave, this is somehow in keeping with ordinary interactions between objects. Their arguments aren’t convincing, but they exist. There are also physicists, the foremost being Roger Penrose, who believe in something like the opposite of the observer effect—that it is the collapse of the wave function that gives rise to consciousness. And there are physicists who believe that quantum physics is a placeholder science that will be discarded once we find a larger physics paradigm that finally reconciles quantum theory with general relativity.

Klavan doubtless knows all this and more, as made plain by his thorough retelling of the many historical zigs and zags of institutional science. So his book is above all, a testament of faith—faith in God and in science’s continuing to reveal Him. I see what he has done. And it is good.

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