In this interview, Dennis Prager introduces Spencer Klavan’s new book Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith. Klavan argues that the Judeo‑Christian concept of the imago dei – humanity created in the image of God – is the unique philosophical premise that made the modern scientific enterprise possible. He explains that without this belief, there would be no reason to expect human minds to grasp universal laws beyond immediate experience. Klavan points to Isaac Newton as the first to fulfill that promise, unifying celestial and terrestrial mechanics and showing that the same mathematical principles govern both. He then traces how the French Enlightenment, epitomized by Pierre‑Simon Laplace’s deterministic worldview, deliberately stripped science of its religious foundations, leading to a secular view of knowledge that later influenced politics and morality. Klavan notes that similar secularizing currents appeared in German and English Enlightenment thought, but also highlights the Romantic backlash (Keats, Coleridge, Goethe) that re‑asserted the necessity of mind, spirit, and a broader notion of Wissenschaft (knowledge). Finally, Klavan claims that contemporary science is again in need of its original religious principles to make sense of both physical and moral questions. The interview ends with Prager promoting Klavan’s book.
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This is about science and faith. Spencer Klaven just came out with this book last week, and his— it is Illuminating Science Through Faith. In my own Bible commentary, The Rational Bible, I note periodically how the Bible for modern science It's so fascinating, the ignorance of so many people because they went to college, and that's enforced ignorance. I mean that quite sincerely. Unfortunately, they don't realize— if they don't ask, why did modern science develop in the West? Might it be the Judeo-Christian origins, the biblical origins, that enabled us to grasp scientific truths? So is that in effect what you're arguing here, that the Bible, that Western religion has paved the way for science? Is that the central argument of your book?
That is certainly a major thrust of my claim, although I'm also arguing that science now needs its religious principles perhaps more than it seemed to a few hundred years ago, that we kind of were able for a while to run on the steam of this materialist account of the world, but that that now is failing to make sense not just of our lives and our politics, but actually of our very rudimentary concepts like matter in motion. But yes, we begin, I think, with this claim that you indicated, which is really the imago dei, the the image of God in man is maybe the most important proposition unique to Judaism among its Near Eastern competitors, and unique to the Judeo-Christian West as a civilization, that writes the promissory note for the modern scientific enterprise. And the reason for that is there is no reason, absent the imago dei, unless you think that man is made in the image of God, there's no reason to expect that the mind of man would be able to understand the universe beyond its immediate surroundings. So if you think that our minds are merely random products of happenstance, that is, they're collections of neurons that have been tossed together by atomic flow out of the primordial sludge, then you might be able to expect that we would predict that water slakes thirst, that we could deal with lions and bears and things that we found immediately around us. But why on earth should we expect that we were going to be able to predict the motions of Saturn or find comets in space and tell when, when they're going to come? Only if our minds are more than just accidents, but actually blueprints for the universe. And yet we do expect this. And the way you can tell is actually by looking at the achievements of a man like Isaac Newton. We all learned about in school, and maybe some of us learned about him as part of this ongoing story, kind of starting with Galileo, that reason gradually had to liberate itself. From religious ideas. This is one common tale, but in fact the opposite almost is true. What Newton did was not just to articulate the laws of gravity, not just to write his three famous laws of motion, but to shatter a boundary that had stood in the way of human knowledge for hundreds of years between the superlunary and the sublunary spheres, above and below the orbit of the Moon. A lot of people thought that the rules were different in the heavens, and Newton felt that no, in fact apples falling from trees and billiard balls on tables move according to the same laws as planets in their orbits. We just have to find them, and he did ultimately write the rules that can describe both of those kinds of motion, seem to be able to describe every sort of motion that one could, one could see. And when he did that, he was delivering on a promise of the Bible, that things in our minds like numbers, ideas that we have that can describe and predict things immediately around us, are also in a kind of macrocosmic, microcosmic way. They're these little keys or blueprints to the whole universe. That's the beginning really of modern science proper, and it comes right out of this idea of man in the image of God.
What happened? Why did science start thinking the origins of Western science coming from the religious mind are no longer necessary? What happened?
I'm very pleased to report that we can blame the French. It's always a good day to do that. And Um, this is true. I'm, I'm only half joking. Uh, so Newton puts forward the Principia Mathematica, and this expands the field of human knowledge greatly. And Newton's quite explicit that what he's doing is making man more able to know the reason that was implanted in the universe by the one creative mind, and that that reason is answered in his own mind, in mankind's soul. And he again and again says this is effectively a religious enterprise, or this is an enterprise with religious premises. But he does also say that he's worried if those are successful, if they deliver on what they promise, then people will be able to explain so much about the world that they will forget this religious background, that by paying closer and closer attention to the material world and by describing the material world in greater and greater detail, it'll start to seem as if they can explain everything using these determinist automatic laws. And that is exactly the philosophy of Pierre-Simon Laplace, who is the greatest, really, inheritor of Newton in the generation immediately after him. Figures out all sorts of amazing things about orbital mechanics, but also is famously said to have stood before Napoleon and told Napoleon that there is no need for God in this scheme of the universe. I have no need for God as a hypothesis. That was where Stephen Meyer's book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, comes from, a sort of response to that anecdote. But what's more interesting to me actually even than that story is something that Laplace himself put to writing in what was called the Essay on Probabilities. And it was there that he made the argument that if you know the motion at— or the position and the momentum of every particle in the universe at any given time, if you could gain that knowledge, a snapshot of particulate motion, you could tell past, present, and future of the entire universe in, in one instant. And gradually it started to look as if the only kind of knowledge there was to be gained was material knowledge, and that material description of all that is— and this was seized upon by folks like Voltaire, who were very eager to make the world into a Newtonian machine and to make universe, especially the human, uh, universe, into a kind of rigorously systematized scheme of of logic and order. And it's from there that you get the logic of the French Revolution. It's from there that you get this whole story of science versus reason, as if those two things are in opposition— or rather, versus reason, as if those two things are in opposition. Um, and I would argue a lot of what we even still live with now, this idea that the science can tell us how to do politics and what our morals should be and so forth, that comes out of that period.
So you're saying The disengagement, the unlinking of science and religion was essentially created by the French in the French Enlightenment. Am I summarizing you correctly?
It began, I think it begins there. I do think that there's more after that.
Oh, undoubtedly. But of course, the French Enlightenment was not the only Enlightenment. There was a German Enlightenment. There was an English Enlightenment. Were they as guilty of the secularization of science as the French?
There is definitely an element of this in the German Enlightenment. There's no question. And some Englishmen can also kind of be brought into this. David Hume, I think, can be brought into this, although he was a critic in many ways of the logic and scientific Revolution. But there are also, in both Germany and in England, there's an important reaction against actually this Enlightenment idea, and that is the Romantic movement, the period that's embodied in poetry by Keats and Coleridge, but also, you know, by Goethe in Germany, which insists upon the necessity, especially of mind. And it's really interesting that this is kind of what they seized on, that the human spirit and the human experience of the world can't actually be accounted for or boiled down to or waved away into these kind of particulate motions. So yeah, I think that you get a lot of this stuff in Germany and in England. It's in Germany that we start in the 19th century to find the word Wissenschaft, meaning knowledge, right?
All right, hold on there. We're gonna— all right, I just want to promote your book here, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith. Spencer Klaven, the book is up at DennisPrager.com.
