Truth Really Matters

The objective of atheistic scientists for the last century, of course, is to try to explain what we see entirely by materialistic reasoning . . . actually a contradiction in terms, because if we are nothing but clods of molecules walking around, constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, then our ‘reasoning’ is just brain chemistry; atoms, molecules, and physical forces have nothing to do with the immaterial qualities of logic and rationality, which are characteristics of personhood. To this day no one has ever made the case for brain chemistry producing consciousness and personhood.

But the game is to keep God out of play. Sadly, the Intelligent Design camp, primarily within compromised evangelicalism, has decided to buy into the Big Bang fantasy, to argue that God must have created the ‘primeval atom’ and then fine-tuned it to flow into galaxies, planets, and ecosystems, with occasional creative intervention along the biological path. They will have to stand before God some day and suffer the consequences for disbelieving Him. God’s creation narrative is totally inconsistent with Big Bang theology, and it is not difficult to follow. (Read Genesis chapters 1 and 2.) It is a sad commentary on the Roman Catholic Church that one of its priests is the founder of atheism’s Genesis account. We’ll return to the Big Bang later.

The theme of how we got here and how Christians should relate to scientific discoveries is explored by Spencer Klavan in his 2024 book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith. Spencer’s doctorate from Oxford is in ancient Greek literature; accordingly, his discussion is philosophical, not technical, yet is boldly ambitious in its attempt to tie discoveries in physics to a Christian perspective.

The book’s preface is written by one of the ID camp’s leaders, Stephen Meyer. He opens by citing surveys on the sense of meaninglessness suffered by young people, who have been relentlessly hammered by propaganda that ‘science’ makes belief in God unreasonable. Spencer’s mission is to reverse the perspective, to show that science continually points not only to God’s existence, but to His brilliance, care, and presence.

Spencer notes that a prime property of human consciousness is that it extracts meaning from its surroundings. For that to work, the universe must itself be more than scattered debris. Order, harmony, and therefore meaning must be “threaded through the grain of all things, networked and embedded into a coherent whole that takes shape under our scrutiny.”

The properties of matter, he argues, are tied to the observers who are doing the counting, weighing, and measuring. After all, that’s what science is, as I’ve written before. It’s about counting, weighing, measuring, and organizing a story about how items relate to each other or work together. The story often includes mathematics . . . consider that any mathematical equation is simply a shorthand sentence. Spencer notes that there is no counting or measuring in a purely material world, because there are no numbers! Numbers are abstractions created by conscious humans.

Spencer: “The world . . . is like a home that sits in darkness until we start a fire in the hearth and take the covers off the furniture. We are what makes it whole.”

Genesis 2:15, 19-20 . . . And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it . . . And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

Psalm 115:16 also comes to mind: The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s: but the earth hath he given to the children of men.

The atheistic / materialistic culture, however, strives to convince us that the “world is made of very tiny ping pong balls moving through empty space. Also that something called ‘energy’ – “which we picture as a sort of crackling light or electric current” – governs how the ping pong balls interact, whether they fuse together or arrange themselves “into larger structures like cats and rivers.” We humans are then just meat sacks moving through the ping pong balls and the lightning bolts. Spencer argues that this picture, even from within a strictly scientific perspective, is not just vulgar and simplistic; it’s wrong.

In recounting a good bit of the history of science from ancient times, Spencer quotes from a Copernicus letter to Pope Paul III on the woeful state of Ptolemaic astronomy, with its ghastly layers of circles upon circles that never quite fit the actual movement patterns of the heavenly bodies: It was “as if someone took hands and feet, and a head and other pieces, from various places – each of them perfectly well depicted, perhaps, but not for the purpose of representing a single person. Since these fragments would not belong to one another in the slightest, what was put together from them would be a monster, not a man.” This Frankensteinian monstrosity of inelegant physics was an insult to God, whose work should display perfection and simplicity.

Copernicus’ mindset, a God-given yearning to know Him through His creation, has driven scientists throughout history to develop beautiful and simple models, whether the scientist professes faith in God or not. Copernicus, of course, found his perfection and simplicity by recognizing that the sun’s motion was not the problem, because (relative to the planets) the sun wasn’t moving. The earth was.

Newton’s mathematics seemed to explain everything about astrodynamics, but Laplace and Lavoisier figured that if Newton’s methods explained everything, then that meant, well, everything. Man, himself, was just a mechanical contrivance and so, if enough data were available and a mind were competent enough to analyze it, then everything that a man did was just a consequence of the mechanical laws governing his atoms. No need to invoke God for whatever happened inside the universe.

The English poet Alexander Pope put it this way: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. God said, Let Newton be: And all was Light!” The atheist Voltaire saw this as good news: “Newton is our Columbus. He has led the way into a new world, and I should like very much to travel there.” Man can do whatever he pleases. There is no God above to interfere.

As a young teenager, such ideas seemed quite plausible to me. No God means no morality. But it also meant no hope, no purpose, nothing to look forward to but aging and death . . . and nothingness. So where did my yearning for meaning come from and in what sense could “I” decide to do anything if “I” were merely brain chemistry?

Klavan notes that faith in the ‘small gods’ of particles and forces peaked as the 19th century drew to a close. “The world was a machine – and so was man, locked into the path laid out for him by the regular movement of atoms through space.” Darwin viewed this positively: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”

Note how Darwin robs from biblical language. Genesis 2:7 . . . “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In this Scripture the voice is active – God breathes life into man. In Darwin’s construct the voice is passive, leaving the source of the breath of life a mystery. It just happened. What luck!

Just what is man? Sigmund Freud, in 1915, opined that “the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm.” Are you inspired? Accordingly, Freud concluded that “the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as nonhuman things.”

Spencer asks the right question: “If thoughts and experiences were to be analyzed into particulate matter, what about the thoughts of the analyst himself? Those, too, must be products of brain chemistry.” Thus the mind of man is “trapped and immobile,” a helpless spectator bound by the laws of physics.

For many years I have confronted atheists with the utter bleakness of their worldview along these lines. They have no answer. You can see the argument I use in my tract, “Who are you?”, at ThinkTracts.com.

Some might see an escape from mechanical predestination by invoking quantum mechanics or chaos theory. When I was a young teenage atheist I knew nothing of such subjects. But there is no escape – adding randomness to mechanical processes has nothing to do with free will and personhood.

Spencer has a different take on quantum phenomena. Starting with Neils Bohr, the original scientist / philosopher / guru for quantum theory, it became evident that the location and motion of particles is tied to human experience. If you can’t ‘see’ it, that is, measure it, you cannot say anything definitive about it. In quantum experiments – measurements of atoms and fundamental particles like electrons and protons and photons – you can experience the result of a measurement, but you can’t say anything about what the particle is doing before you measure it. In Newtonian mechanics, in contrast, you could launch a projectile and have utter confidence that you could predict its trajectory precisely all the way to its target, even though you only looked twice – at launch and at impact. Not so with atomic-scale projectiles.

The ultimate equation ruling quantum phenomena, Schrodinger’s equation, describes the propagation, not of particles but of probability waves associated with those particles. Calculations merely show the probability of a particular outcome. You cannot know what the particle is doing while in transit. And if you work to pin down its location, the momentum becomes wholly uncertain; and vice-versa. That’s Heisenberg. If you try to peek during the trajectory, you screw up the experiment. The observer, the scientist, cannot avoid influencing results. Einstein saw that as ‘spooky.’ I won’t get into the details, but it seems like human consciousness cannot avoid entanglement with some quantum measurements.

Spencer observes that Galileo and Descartes aspired to transcend subjective descriptions of reality, purifying the world down to raw facts of position, mass, and location. But now we see that – at least at the quantum level – human perception affects and even determines reality. For example, with two entangled photons, the polarization state of one is determined only when the other is measured, even if the two photons have traveled billions of miles apart. It’s not just that we simply don’t know which one is vertically polarized and which one is horizontal. Until you measure one, neither can be said to be in any specific state.

Spencer emphasizes it this way: “The world is not made only of material objects. It is made of the meeting between mind and matter. It is this human encounter with the outside world that brings it shimmering into an array of form, color, and light.” Therefore, the human mind is far more fundamental to the universe itself than has been assumed by the materialists of the last two centuries. This is not surprising to one who believes that human beings are made in the image of God, with a spirit that transcends simple space-time. We don’t have to understand how it all works to recognize that God and man are more than particles in motion.

Extending the thought, Spencer reasons that if we were objects, then we are nothing. Francis Schaeffer takes this as a presuppositional starting point – if man is a machine, he is no different from a rock on the ground. Spencer argues that quantum phenomena have shown us that if we are objects then we could not see. It is meaningless to speak of matter without its effect on the human mind. We thinking, reasoning, rational humans are the creatures who can ‘see’ it, which gives creation meaning. This idea motivated Spencer’s title: Light of the Mind, Light of the World.

The mind’s light dimmed as people embraced the supposed determinism of Newtonian mechanics, despite Newton himself viewing physical order and harmony as revealing the glory of God’s creation. Newton’s optical experiments, prismatically dividing sunlight into specified colors, seemed to diminish another mystery. Then Darwin’s acolytes concluded that even the human brain was formed by happenstance and survival.

Yet all of science, all of observations, hypothesis-making, mathematical models, and inference to the best explanation are immaterial products of the human mind. The soul makes science. Quantum theory and experiment are even more intimate.

“A world stripped bare of human experience is no world at all. It is a painted stage set, a mute idol giving off the appearance of life. We do not stand outside the world to see it ‘as it really is’ – we enter the world so that it can become what it really is . . . Reality as we experience it is a meeting of mind with matter.”

He mentions the rainbow, insisting that it is not primarily about diffraction and spectra. “Only the onlooker, in whose mind the colors themselves find their existence, can say what a rainbow is.” If Spencer were more grounded in Scripture, he would have mentioned that the first appearance of a rainbow in the Bible and on Earth was after the flood, when God announced it as a symbol of promise that He would never destroy the Earth again with a flood. (The hydrological cycle – especially rainfall – did not operate as we see it today until after the Genesis Flood.) The purpose of the rainbow was to symbolically represent God’s covenant with man about judgment.

Spencer does cite other Scriptures, notably Matthew 5:14 – “Ye are the light of the world.” And Matthew 6:22-23 – “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.”

Light is significant throughout Scripture. It is not of small significance that God created light and used it to illuminate the Earth on the first day of creation, but did not create the sun and the stars until the fourth day. Spencer notes that light came from Mind, not matter. Spencer: “It is impossible that the world could have existed without the warm light of a living mind.” Jesus, in John 12:46, declared, “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.” Our eternal existence – every one of us – depends on seeing and responding to that Light – a metaphor, indeed, but a metaphor with life or death consequences.

Spencer drives toward his big conclusion by contrasting objectivism with postmodernism, and that both fall far short of an adequate philosophy or worldview. Objectivism, made famous by Ayn Rand, includes the premise that reality is entirely independent of consciousness. It also includes an atheistic materialism. Materialism / naturalism is obviously a dead end because it does not account for consciousness or the breadth of human experience . . . love, joy, hope, meaning, purpose, integrity, beauty, etc. As I found as a young man, such a philosophy is depressing in its pointlessness and simply inspires a search for something more.

The postmodern conceit is that truth is up to us. Michel Foucault preached that both man himself and science can be refashioned by force of will. Reality is up to us. Don’t like your birth sex? Change your pronouns. It is obvious that this postmodern subjectivism is also a dead end, as Spencer comments, making even objectivism look good by comparison.

Spencer’s argument is that the world is neither a dead object nor a construct of human will. “It is a relationship between subject and object, a meeting between mind and matter.” A book, for example, is not just a combination of paper and ink and characters and events created by an author, who then throws his work into a vault. His book needs readers! It’s not really a book until the ideas enter another’s mind.

Then he turns back to physics. A photon is not something in isolation, floating along on its own. It only has potential states (polarization, energy) and paths that don’t take shape until it’s been measured, seen.

Spencer relates the case of Albert Einstein who, when he was a boy, loved the Bible. He was hungry for an approach to life with weight and purpose. But the reading of popular science books stifled his early Jewish faith. Seeing apparent contradictions, he felt he had to choose science to make sense of reality. Unfortunately, he was conned by an evolutionary and materialistic worldview. He then devoted his life to the small and narrow set of truths associated with particles and the forces governing their motion. He never realized he was casting aside the vast range of truths attached to his image-of-God personhood that cannot be explained AT ALL within materialism.

Like so many other skeptics, Einstein settled into his materialistic worldview while still an ignorant, inexperienced youth, and later, as an adult with fully developed critical thinking skills, never revisited the foundations upon which he bet his eternity. In other words, by the time Einstein got smart, he never applied his smarts to figure out where we come from. Academia is filled with these types.

Spencer: “And so it is that soul after soul is left bereft and directionless in a society that teaches them to treat their bodies like meat and their minds like a chemistry set. The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.”

Spencer ends his work by pleading that in this age, “science and theology desperately need each other.” God’s majesty is proclaimed throughout creation – see Psalm 19 for the Holy Spirit’s take on this.

He’s right, of course. It would be easier for him to make the case if he took the Genesis account of creation – in six days – literally, along with the Flood that accounts for the massive, worldwide sedimentary rock layers and fossil beds, along with the rest of biblical history. But then he would have to identify with those accursed young-Earth creationists . . . like me.

I want to commend Spencer Klavan for taking a shot at relating the mysteries of quantum mechanics to consciousness and how that connects mind to matter on a grand scale. I don’t think he entirely made his case, because there are simply too many unknowns regarding both disciplines. But his effort was valiant, especially since his background is neither in physics nor in the philosophy of science.

But I think he’s on the right track, because his thesis is ultimately biblical. God made man with body, soul, and spirit. We are made in His image – yes, that’s a lot to unpack – as no other creature is. We are connected, therefore, both to God and to His creation. In fact, the second person of the Godhead entered into the physical creation as one of us. Jesus will be both God and man for eternity future.

We have much to learn in the ages to come, “when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.” (Acts 3:19)

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com