Unraveling The Mysteries of The Ancient World | Spencer Klavan
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Obviously, to me, the route forward lies instead in a recovery of our uniqueness as opposed to these machines. What are the things that we do that they don't? Like experience, like see colors, like feel love. I mean...

For a long time, we've thought of ourselves as the smartest things in the world. That may be changing. But one nice thing about the Bible is it actually never defined humanity as the smartest entities on Earth. It defined us as being in the image of God. And that, to me, is a better route forward for recovering what we are and how we can kind of survive and even grow into this age of AI and all the other stuff we're discovering. ♪

Thank you.

Most recently, Klavan's expertise is on full display in The Daily Wire's new series, Foundations of the West, where he sits down with Jordan Peterson to discuss the enduring relevance of classical ideas. In today's episode, we explore Klavan's latest book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Klavan rejects the popular notion that science and religion are incompatible, and instead forecasts a future where a scientific discovery leads to a religious resurgence.

We also discuss the symbolic relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, as well as the religious observations of great scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. From the origins of the West to the shortfalls of AI, don't miss this exceptional conversation with Spencer Clavin. Stay tuned, and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special. ♪

Spencer, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Ben, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about your brand new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which is all about the relationship between science and faith. So obviously the way that many people are taught in public school or have come to believe because of the media is that science and reason are completely opposed to faith and religion. And these two things have been in conflict forever and sort of the key relationship

that everybody is told is the story of Copernicus. And the basic idea is that anybody who is in any way, or Galileo rather, that anybody who is in any way religious is obviously opposed to science and reason. You're telling the opposite story in this book. Yeah, I am. And I think that conventional wisdom that you just described is a real disservice to people, just everyday people who go through our schooling system and get sold this bill of goods about the...

opposition or even the war between science and religion, because it makes people feel like in order to be smart, in order to be rational, in order to live in the real world, they have to abandon the most important thing to all of us, which is the life of the soul and the life of the spirit. And so what I'm arguing in this book is that that narrative about the divide or the war between science and religion isn't just about

It's not just wrong. It's also wildly out of date when it comes to the science itself, which is now starting to reveal these fascinating facts about the material world that we live in that starts to sound more and more like the world as described in the book.

in the Jewish and the Christian scriptures. So I think we really need just a hard reset on this whole idea. I wrote the book in order to take people through the real history of science and reveal how religion has always motivated the best scientific discoveries and how science, as it is currently unveiling the natural world, can reveal to us the glory of God. And just

Just to take that barrier away from people who feel as if in order to be rational or to believe in science, they have to throw out all their traditional ancestral faith and belief in the creator of the world. It is a wonderful and necessary task because, as you say, this is the biggest barrier that's now thrown in the way of people who are traditionally religious is the idea that you're an idiot if you're traditionally religious. Because how could you believe all these ridiculous miracle stories when you have right in front of you

a phone and the phone is filled with technology. Do you have to believe the dinosaurs weren't real in order to believe that the God of the Bible is real? Why exactly would you believe in these miracle stories, but somehow, you know, suggest that you can still operate in the real world? And of course, the reality is that science can't prove itself. This is something that scientists are constantly attempting to sort of ignore. But science as a process is not a provably true process. And in fact, the very idea of an absolute truth

is a faith principle because evolutionary biologists, I've said many times, does not point to truth. It points to adaptability. And so you can say that perhaps an idea is adaptable, that perhaps it helps us in our evolutionary fitness, but you can't ever make the claim that it has an absolute level of real truth. That is a faith principle. And in fact, virtually all of science is rooted in faith principles like that.

That's absolutely right. And I would add to that and say that whenever you are confronted with a crisis in science, which happens all the time, a question that seems to have no logical answer or a contradiction, a paradox that, for example, physicists are now facing when it comes to the relationship between science and the world.

between relativity and quantum mechanics. Whenever you come up against one of those roadblocks in the progress of science, in order to proceed, you have to have, even if you don't admit it, you have to have a kind of religious faith, which is a belief that our human minds, our little monkey cantaloupe brains that evolved on this planet are connected to

to a logic that runs throughout the entire created universe. There's absolutely no materialist reason to believe in that. And the pioneers of the scientific revolution didn't think that. Galileo is actually a perfect example. When he was being challenged to defend his observations with the telescope, one of the things he said is, I don't want to insult God...

by believing that my reason has a hard stopping point. In other words, if it's true that human reason only extends so far and no further, that's an insult to religion. The religious point of view at that time, or one at least of the most passionately faithful points of view, was that because we're made in the image of God, that classic Judeo-Christian idea,

Our minds are little microcosms or templates for understanding the whole rest of the natural world. If you take away that religious conviction, you have no reason to believe that or to expect good answers to the questions that science teaches us to ask. I don't know if you saw, Ben, the three-body problem show on Netflix that made such a splash. But what

But what's amazing about that series and the trilogy of books that they're based on is that's a science fiction work that genuinely takes place in a universe without the ordering principle of God. And it's a universe of chaos. That's what the three body problem is. It's a problem with no rational solution that you can write out in an equation that the human mind can grasp. And as

Liu Xishin, the author, takes that story further and further out, you realize what a nightmare horror world it is to live in when you can't believe in that. But he's the only guy that's taking the atheist point of view seriously in science and showing what a disaster it really is. Most of the time, we tend to blithely assume that science is going to keep working without the underpinnings of God. And I just don't think that's going to fly.

And again, this holds true for a wide variety of these premises. So one that you mentioned there is the premise that human beings have a capacity to have a mind that actually reflects truths in the universe, which is a really arrogant point of view. And yet it also happens to be true. And it's not arrogant when you realize that God made us in his image. As soon as God says that it's no longer arrogant, it's just an accurate depiction of the way the world works.

Another one that scientists are frequently fond of ignoring when it comes to themselves, but they'll spread the reverse for everybody else, is the basic idea that they have agency in the world. That scientists are sitting around, they're making discoveries that what they do matters, that it has importance in the world. Nowhere in a logic that suggests that we're meatballs aimlessly wandering through the universe does it suggest either that those meatballs have force of their own, that they can be self-directed, or that that has any importance in a cosmic scheme. And yet, every scientist that I know and that I've ever met

ignores their own perspectives and philosophies when it comes to how they act in the world. What's hilarious about that determinist point of view that you're describing, that we're just the product, the outcome of a series of basically physical interactions, stuff bumping up against other stuff. What's really funny about that attitude is that it almost always comes accompanied with an instruction to act in a certain way. You are simply the product of evolution. Therefore, don't worry about this or that.

spiritual concern. Well, if I'm just the product of evolution, why should I take your advice? How can I take your advice? Why should I listen to you? What does your word, what do your words have to do with anything besides the product of chemical interactions in your brain? A lot of this, you know, comes from, of course, we can blame the French. And I tell this story in the book. A lot of this comes from the French interpreters of Isaac Newton.

Newton, of course, one of the great geniuses in physics, in mathematics, in science generally, comes up with these clear and simple rules for describing physical motion as we typically encounter it throughout the universe. And that was one of those barriers, one of those roadblocks that had been broken down. It was called the superlunary and the sublunary realm, the idea that different rules applied beyond the moon –

then apply here. And Newton shattered that barrier, revealed that you can describe planets and dew drops and billiard balls with the same set of equations. So the French took this and thought, oh, I can use this to disprove the existence of God. Newton would have been appalled at this. He believed, of course, that what he had done was revealed the glory of God. A lot of the Enlightenment era French interpreters of Newton were

Keen to use this as a description of a universe that needed no God to continue on working. And the major advance for advancer of this idea was this guy, Pierre Simon Laplace, who lived through the French Revolution, served under Napoleon.

huge luminary of French physics. And he writes this essay on probabilities, which is really an essay on the idea that there are no probabilities, only certainties. And he says, if you can conceive of a mind that would take in the physical location of every particle in the universe and its initial momentum and the conditions like this,

that you could tell the story of past, present and future in one instance. And of course, he's talking about the mind of God, but he's proposing that humanity can achieve that kind of perspective and know past, present, future through an equation, through central planning. I mean, the consequences of this are all over modern bureaucratic government and communism, etc.,

But the joke here, the punchline is Laplace was dead wrong. And that's the major advance that physics, particulate physics has made in the last hundred years begins with the discovery that particulate motion actually can't be fully determinist. So even at the atomic level, this idea which has taken hold in so many people's mind is scientifically false. And that's one of the things I point out in the book.

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Yeah, so let's talk about that because obviously you get deep into, in the book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, you get into the modern discoveries with regard to quantum mechanics. And of course, it's been stated that if you actually understand quantum mechanics, then that just demonstrates that you don't understand quantum mechanics. It is bizarre a world. It is almost impossible to truly understand what the hell anybody is talking about because it really is about wild levels of indeterminacy, things spontaneously popping in and out of existence and such.

What does that have to do with the exploding of certain ideas that atheists and materialists have about the universe? Sure. Well, Albert Einstein said what you were just describing in another way. He said that this system of quantum mechanics, which was then emerging, looks like the ravings of a highly intelligent psychotic. In other words, the kind of like schizophrenic that hijacks your email list with a long Comic Sans description of how everything fits together. That's what...

quantum physics can kind of look like. And as I said, it begins really with the work, the earlier work of Ludwig Boltzmann, who kind of inspired these guys like Max Planck and later pioneers who discover, as you say, that at certain levels of the material world, we're not actually looking at a bunch of billiard balls clattering together. We're not looking at these lumps of matter colliding. We're looking at something much more mysterious and strange.

The best description of this that I know of that's ever been given was given by Niels Bohr, who was one of the great lights of this time. And he was the founder of what's now called the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics. And what he basically says is the reason this stuff looks so weird to us is because we are beginning for the first time in mathematics to approach the threshold of the world outside of our reality.

We're always having to describe the results of our observations, the results of our experiments. But what we're trying to get at in quantum physics is what happens when our backs are turned. And

And it stands to reason, Bohr thought, that without human perception, things don't follow even the most basic categories that we apply to the world, like motion through space and time. These things that we think of as kind of hard-coded into reality are actually brought into being by the human experience, by human observation and perception, by conscious mind.

And what I think this really means is that the world of Laplace, which is this pure machine described so beautifully by the Newtonian equations, this world that we think of as a kind of dead object with no human involvement, no human will as part of it, is actually something that we are co-creators of. The world needs us to take the shape that we experience the world in. And

And that actually is the reality, the situation described in Genesis. As you alluded to, man in the image of God, a creation that has to be seen in order to be brought into being, a creation that is the product of language and communication. All of these things are at the heart of what quantum physics suggests and leads us to discover about the world. And it totally upends this idea that we're meat robots living in a metal machine.

you know, what you're talking about also has a sort of corollary for religious people who have bought into this binary as well. So we've talked about scientific materialists who've bought into the binary that you can't be a religious person and still believe in science. But there have been a lot of religious communities that have responded to that binary by saying, fine, we just won't buy into science. Alright,

all right, so if you're telling me one of these things is false, then I pick science is false and the Bible is true. And it's literally, literally factual in every respect that there's no metaphor, there's no poetry. It's not, it's not a bunch of different forms of literature that everything is to be taken. Absolutely. Literally that the earth is actually some 5,000 years old, that the dinosaurs did not exist, that they were planted there by God. How,

How do you respond to people who are religious and take the Bible seriously, so seriously that they say that if the words of the Bible seem to be in conflict with the discoveries of science, then science must just be wrong?

Well, you know, I have a tremendous respect for people that are so firm in their faith that they want to make sure that nothing attacks or destroys or undermines it. I know that this is something we cling to as the core of what makes us virtuous, what leads us into the truth, what shapes our lives to be good and upstanding. And I have no desire to take that away from anybody or to attack it even really. But again,

But I do tell a pair of stories in the book that I think speaks to this. And the first one is the story of Albert Einstein, whom we've mentioned already, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, who begins as a boy with a deep and abiding love and fascination for the Bible and for his Jewish upbringing and teaching. And at around the age of 12, says Einstein, he finds out about paleontology. He discovers dinosaurs.

And he basically says, I gave up my Bible for my science textbooks because I was looking for truth and I concluded that here was truth.

Now, that's a person who has accepted an understanding of truth that was effectively invented in the wake of the scientific revolution. That unless something is telling you materially verifiable facts that can be measured and observed on a graph or a chart, then it has no truth at all. And of course, Einstein weighs the Bible and religion in the balance and finds it wanting.

The other story I tell is Charles Spurgeon, who says exactly what you say. This is the great preacher, Charles Spurgeon. And he says, some people are confronting me with this evolutionary theory. And I say that my grandmother has more sense than the evolutionists because she knows that every new development and idea that comes along doesn't need to distract her from her faith. And I think that that's...

a totally understandable response to the situation that we've been seeing, but I think it has proven really ineffective as a response. And one reason why is I actually think it's the opposite side of the coin from the mistake that Einstein made. So Einstein has basically been sold this bill of goods that if it's not materially true,

in a verifiable dates and facts kind of way, then it's not true at all. Spurgeon is accepting the very same thing and playing the materialist's game. And there are certain branches of biblical fundamentalism that I actually think without realizing it

Give the game away before it starts by refusing to admit the possibility of metaphor, of storytelling. Of course, there are historical facts recorded in the Bible, but there's also a much larger and richer vision of humanity that's conveyed in all these other different ways traditionally throughout the history of the church.

And the last thing I'd say is if we're going to toss all of that out, if we're going to get rid of the possibility that the Bible has more to reveal to us about our humanity than just the deadening ideas of materialist science, then we're abandoning a whole bunch of people, smart, well-intentioned people to Einstein's fate. And I don't think any evangelist with an ounce of heart should do that.

I think we should be able and willing to speak to the people like Einstein who are seeking in all sincerity for truth. And what we should be telling them is not the truths of science aren't true. What you can see with your own eyes aren't real. What we should be telling them is there's so much more that you can understand about the world, about yourself, about your place in the universe than only science and only matter can tell you. And that's what's contained in our scriptures and our wisdom traditions.

So this conversation has already sort of taken us to a series that you and I filmed together with Jordan Peterson called Foundations of the West. The first couple of episodes are out right now. My episode with Jordan was in Jerusalem, and it was very much about sort of the faith principles that we've talked about, the individual made in the image of God, the changes that the Hebrew Bible makes to ancient texts in order to obtain these moral lessons. If you look at it

old ancient texts, what they always talk about is the king is made in the image of God, but the people are completely different. The people are never spoken of as in the image of God. The Bible takes that and universalizes that and says, no, every single individual is made in the image of God just to take one biblical principle. These principles are revelatory principles. These are not things that you can reason your way to, that despite what the founders said, that these are self-evident truths, they're certainly not self-evident. They are self-evident to Christians who are living in the 18th century. They are not self-evident to people who are living in 1000 years.

B.C. And so the the the the Bible's description of the relationship between humanity and the divine, that does require a revelatory touch. It requires some some finger of God touching man at some point in time in order to bring these principles down. And those principles become sort of the seedbed for Western civilization on the one hand. And then episode two, you took Jordan to Greece. Why don't you talk about what that was like?

Absolutely. Well, I would suggest, Ben, just that the truths of the Declaration are self-evident only in the sense that once you see them, you cannot unsee them. That's right. And I think that's kind of what they meant. But we now have this impoverished, almost progressivist idea that self-evident means just lying there on the ground for us to pick up because we're so smart and so brilliant that we were able to effectively discern them perfectly. And not only perfectly, but

but better than our ancestors who taught them to us, right? In a way that is more pure, more just, more virtuous than all the many people who had to sweat and bleed and die to figure this stuff out. And I love what you say about the Bible as revisionist history in your episode, right? That there is this whole literature pre-existing the Genesis story, at least in its present form, that describes the world in a different way.

And Genesis is actually saying, no, all these idolatrous religions are wrong. Man is made in the image of God. It's a universal principle. On the other side, not of the world itself, but of the known world, on the other side of the West, you have Athens, which is developing, fascinatingly, kind of a separate tradition. Doesn't have this revelation, doesn't have some of the truth that you can only learn through scripture. But

is becoming a hotbed, especially in the 5th century BC, for the stuff that you can gradually work your way to by logic or what the Greeks called logos, the reason that threads through all creation. So what Jordan and I talked about when he came to Athens is just how that

human tradition was built up century by century until it reaches this kind of pinnacle, I think, in classical Athens and would then await the coming really of Jerusalem to meet up with it, to touch it from on high through the spread of Christianity and the Roman Empire. And all of that is a story that we tell in the rest of the series, which I'm really excited for people to see.

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So let's talk about what, you know, it's a question that I ask in a book I wrote, you know, now years ago called The Right Side of History. You know, what exactly does Athens need Jerusalem for and what does Jerusalem need Athens for? Because again, this goes back to sort of that science reason versus religion divide. You know, if you are a devotee of Greek thought, then it's,

It's easy to say, okay, well, we don't need any of this Judaic nonsense merging and becoming Christianity. We don't need any of that sort of stuff. You know, we've got a self-contained philosophy. That self-contained philosophy has created democracy, has created extraordinary military power, because obviously Greece is a military power that is springing from a very small and relatively, you know, insular region of the world. What do we need Jerusalem for if we start in Greece? And what does Jerusalem need Greece for? Why isn't that just a self-contained system?

Yeah. Not only is it really easy to ask that question, lots of people did. In fact, people asked it from both sides of this equation, right? Tertullian, what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? And in the episode that I did with Jordan, we talked about the Sermon on the Areopagus, which is where St. Paul in his missionary journeys says,

ends up in Athens and he ends up in really the oldest site of political authority in the city, not the Acropolis, the big famous one with the Parthenon, but this rock, essentially Mars Hill. And at that point, the author of the account in Acts tells us that the Athenians were busy engaged in doing nothing other than hearing whatever new idea could come to them. And this is why they summoned

Well, at least this guy's got news. At least he's got something interesting to say. And I think that speaks to the condition of the classical world and pagan philosophy by the time Christianity showed up on the scene, by the time Athens met Jerusalem. That might give us a key into the answer to your question. What does this beautiful, perfect system of philosophy need that the philosophers can't already tell us?

And the answer is that Hellenistic philosophy, Greek philosophy after the pinnacle of that civilization, had kind of reached a point like the point in Ecclesiastes where it says vanity, vanity, all is vanity. They described and cataloged everything in the known world, come up with beautiful thought structures for organizing and understanding what they had experienced. But

But what they didn't know or what they could only guess at was the trajectory of us, of humanity, beyond this self-contained material world that they had described. And so in some ways, what they needed is the same thing that science needs in order to function. Like we were just talking about earlier, they needed some kind of message from outside of the self-contained natural system that they had described.

described. And that's what Paul came bringing. As you say, that's what scripture, both Jewish and Christian scripture, the Judeo-Christian tradition claims to offer. And some people, the Bible says, accepted this. Some people didn't. But

If there was something that Greek philosophy needed, it was that motion forward, which transformed the rest of history. Because instead of this idea of stasis, you have this idea of the coming of the kingdom of God, which will lead in time to the abolition and discreditation of slavery. It will lead to all sorts of destruction.

revolutions in the ideology of the Democratic Republic. It creates, really, the nation that we live in now. It forms those self-evident truths in the minds of the founders, and it ends us up here today. So we're really talking, I guess, in this series about stuff that you have to know in order to understand

where we are and who we are. One of the things that I think you could say about what Jerusalem does is Jerusalem provides a value system that allows you to balance between the sort of tyrannical impulses that you see in Greece and the freedom impulses that you see in Greece, which they're constantly battling with one another. You have this obvious freedom impulse. You have democracy to a certain extent, obviously. You have freedom of speech.

to a large extent, unless you violate, in which case, you know, theoretically, they can bring you up and poison you. But they have these principles that don't exist in other parts of the world. And then you also have some pretty tyrannical overtones to, you know, Plato's writing, for example. Plato's Republic is a full-scale communistic tyranny that is justified by the logic

that Plato lays out. Now, you can read that in sort of a Straussian manner and suggest that actually what Plato is talking about here is a dystopia and that he doesn't actually mean anything that he's actually saying in Plato's Republic. Karl Popper would argue the opposite. He would argue he means exactly what he's saying in Plato's Republic. But in either case, what...

what Jerusalem says is here is a higher value system. You can apply it to these other values and that allows you to order these values determined, dependent on what exactly you're attempting to obtain and what the higher goal is. Because when it comes to Greece, they're widely varying ideas of what the higher goal is. And it's very easy for that to itself devolve into a moral relativism. And I think this is where you see a sort of mirror to the openness of American society, American society, incredibly open, lots of free speech.

But it's very easy to see how if liberty becomes an inherent value rather than an instrumental value, or freedom itself is the value, then it's very easy to see that evolve into moral relativism. Because

why exactly is freedom to do bad is an argument I have with our friend Jeremy Boring all the time. I've made the argument that there is no actual, in any sort of moral sense, freedom to do bad. Freedom exists in order to effectuate the good, but you don't have freedom to do, freedom to do bad does not make things better. Freedom as an additive to doing a bad thing actually makes the thing worse. And so the minute you say freedom is the highest value, what you're really saying is there are no other values. And so you end up in a sort of morally relativistic place, which is what the Bible rejects.

Fascinating. That's such an interesting idea. I mean, this is the idea that you don't want to have such an open mind that all your ideas fall out of your head, right? And that definitely was a problem in the history of ancient Greece, not only as you suggest these sort of flirtations with authoritarianism that we get even in the best philosophers like Plato, but also in some of the worst episodes and most shameful episodes in Athens' own history, the classic epistolic.

to cite here is the Melian episode in the Peloponnesian War, which the historian Thucydides talks about this as a moment when Athenian love of ideas and debate and discussion and weighing different possible values against each other turns its shadow face toward the world and reveals the corrupt version of this, which is pure relativism. And the words that Thucydides portrays

puts in the mouth of the Athenian delegate is the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.

And something that Aristotle himself would have told you is that every human good has a corruption and a shadow side. And the better the good is, the worse the fall of the corrupted version. So for Athens, which had engaged, embarked upon this kind of glorious adventure into discovering that there were absolute truths, that they could be known at least in part by human minds and approached.

And that the way to do that was through this tradition of isegoria, the kind of open debate and discussion and isonomia, the equality of rights or equality of the law, I guess we would say. You know, the ugly version of that is, well, if everything is permitted, then nothing is true and all courses of action are equally valid. So you just end up effectively in a

of wills. And this was part of Greek philosophy going way, way back. And you're right. I think it's one of the avenues that Gerardus

Jerusalem closed off was this idea that you could just go on having this discussion forever, which is kind of the fate, if you'll recall, of the Greek philosophers in Dante's Inferno. They're not in hell, they're just at the gates of hell and they're having this conversation eternally with no hope of ever reaching a conclusion. And Athens says, no, there is actually a highest good. And it does it by creating what you describe as

Rather, this is Jerusalem ends up doing what you describe and establishing this hierarchy of goods and saying it's not just that everything is as good as everything else, but rather that you can have some things that are good, like freedom, as a route to things that are higher, like excellence, virtue, beauty. And you need freedom in order to get there. But if you prioritize freedom over the thing that it exists to create, then you're going to end up standing on your head. And that's not good for anybody.

And it does feel as though, you know, we are sort of doomed to just recreate these debates over the course of time because it feels as though the West is sort of late stage Athenian. The West having now run its course in terms of Christianity, according to the church statistics, that as people run

away from churches and synagogues and traditional religion, that what you're ending up with is this radical polarization on the planet more generally between a sort of religious fundamentalism that rejects everything Athens-related, which would be probably Islamic fundamentalism, and then the sort of weakness and moral relativism that you see predominant in Europe, which

is basically destroying itself on the shoals of this moral relativism, and also at the same time opening its door to the fundamentalists to actually invade it, which is a fascinating turn of events because as Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, I mean, the real histories for about a thousand years at least

has been that the West has had the upper hand, and that during the Roman Empire, the West also had the upper hand. So there's a brief period of time in which the West did not have the upper hand, and you would actually see, for example, Islamic invasions of Europe. But basically, since about 1100, 1200, that's not been the case. The West has been in the ascendancy in the era of

powerful and self-confident Christianity. And as that begins to fade, you're actually starting to see the reverse. You're starting to see a reversion to what would be more historically a sort of foreign policy dark age, where you have an invasion of people who are coming from places that fundamentally disagree with any Enlightenment ideals. And they're creating massive problems inside the West. And the West has no systemic immunity to fight it at all.

Well, this would not totally shock, I don't think, some of the great Greek historians and theorists of history. In some sense, what you're describing is anticyclosis, the cycle of regimes. And in our modern day, you hear it kind of in meme form as, you know, hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times.

And there's no off ramp as far as I can see from that reality, this side of paradise. I do think that as humans, we're always staving off disaster one more day. And I would also agree with you that wherever we are in that cycle of history right now, it

It's clearly a crisis point. It's clearly a point when we've lost a lot of our civilizational mojo. The confidence has kind of drained out of what was in the 20th century the heyday of Western liberal democracies. Now there's all this confusion and even outright denial about the ideas that kind of gave rise to that flowering.

And, you know, one of two things I think is going to happen in this moment. We are either going to go the way of every decadent empire ever, and it'll be hundreds of years of darkness and sorrow and suffering until the next one gradually comes along. But given the option, I would prefer rather instead a revival, a renaissance. And those sorts of things also have happened without total calamity in the history of the West. The renaissance that we all know and love is

of in, you know, the 16th century and slightly before of visual art, isn't the only Renaissance that we've been through. There have been these revivals of the great ideas of the West because not only do we have this Athens side of the coin, but we have this Jerusalem side, which in its Christian modality includes the idea of resurrection, that it's actually possible for one person, one culture to persist and live in

through death and a kind of birth to new life. And I think if there's anything that what you and I are doing here and talking about here, Ben, if there's any point and purpose to it, it's to try to clear the way for that sort of revival and resurrection. It'll begin with recovery, but it won't end there. It will have to carry this stuff forward into the future, into a world that includes science and computers and quantum physics and

And the internet and all the stuff that we are now grappling with. But the first step, I think, is to clear away some of the garbage that has accreted over time that teaches us we can't look back to our ancestral truth, our religious traditions, in order to steer us forward to hopefully a future that doesn't involve like total civilizational decline.

And one of the things that you talk about in the book is this sort of transhumanist movement, this sort of bizarre desire to move beyond humanity itself. And you do see a lot of this in the AI community. I mean, if you've spent any time in the tech bro community, yeah, I have a lot of people there who I really like. They're very interesting thinkers. But there is this desire for almost...

to act as a deus ex machina, that AI is going to solve all the problems because it is going to be Laplace's machine. It's going to take in all the data. It's going to pump out all the data. All the data are going to be more accurate about our own desires, wishes, and wants than anything that was

put into the machine and that it will essentially be able to govern our lives for us. And that will inherently change humanity in new, variegated ways. The tech optimists would say in good ways. I think that people who have more of a religious bent would say in some pretty unforeseeable and maybe terrible ways. What do you make of AI and where do you think humanity is going as a philosopher?

Well, hey, I have a great idea. Let's build a machine that has the outward appearance of a human being.

Then let's attribute to it consciousness and allow it to rule our lives. Nobody has ever come up with this idea before. Oh, wait, that is the literal description of how idols are built in like Psalm 115, right? So this has been a tendency. You might even say the central kind of gimmick or tick of the human heart forever. And every time it happens, the excuse is the same. It's, oh, this time we actually have the tech thing.

though. And I'm pretty sure they probably said that about the brick and mortar that they used to make the Tower of Babel. It's like, oh, this time we've got brick to put together. And now it's, well, this time we've got this hyper-powerful code, which

Let me say up front, I think is awesome. Like, I think it's kind of amazing that we've created these large language models, that they do something no computer has yet been able to do, that with all this stuff, all these applications that we have yet to discover in like, say, medicine. And I've talked to scientists who use it to kind of model deformities in genes that might help them to come up with new cures. And I mean, the list is endless. But

In order to use any tool rightly, you have to know what it's doing. And what struck me about the advent of AI and the moment of peak AI is how wildly disconnected the reality was from what people were saying about this technology. What AI is doing is it's basically taking a bunch of words or images off the internet, scraping them into a big black box, transcribing

turning them up into slop and taking the average, which is why so much of the poetry that ChatGPT writes is such trash, is because it's the mid, it's like functionally, definitionally mid. Ton of great uses for that. That's not the same thing as human thought. And even people that study like neuroscience are aware that there's no isomorphism between what that machine is doing and what our thought is doing. We can certainly trick ourselves into believing that it's thinking,

And again, people have been doing that since they had to carve statues out of wood and name them ball and bow down before them. But that's the thing that's going to bring disaster, not the machine running out of hand and figuring out how to turn us all into paperclips, but us in our dead end philosophy with no better idea than to outsource our humanity onto machines, believing that this object is going to be

Our savior. That's a dead end that we've just got to get over. It's again, sort of why I wrote the book and why I wrote it the way that I wrote it and why I spend some time on AI in there is because when people make these predictions, it says nothing about the technology and everything about the people inventing and using the technology.

And insofar as what they think they're doing is building a human being or a god, they reveal themselves to know less than nothing about philosophy, theology, or our humanity. And obviously, to me, the route forward lies instead in a recovery of our uniqueness as opposed to these machines. What are the things that we do that they don't? Like experience, like see colors, like feel love. I mean—

For a long time, we've thought of ourselves as the smartest things in the world. That may be changing. But one nice thing about the Bible is it actually never defined humanity as the smartest entities on Earth. It defined us as being in the image of God. And that, to me, is a better route forward for recovering what we are and how we can kind of survive and even grow into this age of AI and all the other stuff we're discovering. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's such a deep point, especially because one of the big questions—

that arises from AI on a very practical level is what do you do with your day? I mean, if the idea of AI is that it's going to take up all of our work, that it's going to essentially be the Star Trek replicator machine, it's gonna be able to make whatever you want at any time, it's gonna have a 3D printer and you're gonna have an idea, it's gonna make it for you in five seconds flat. What do you actually do with your day? And the traditional answer would have been, you spend it with your family and you spend it with your community and you spend it at your church or your synagogue and that you learn about God and that you actually connect with your fellow human beings.

And we've gone so far astray from that. It's hard for people to even picture that as a possibility for a thing to do with their life.

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, this is Marx had this vision of what the world would be like without work. And it's interesting that even Marx, you know, he had yet to see the disastrous consequences of his ideas in practice. But he has this idea that, yeah, we're going to do fishing in the morning. We'll spend time with our family in the afternoon and maybe we'll write poetry criticism in the evening. And you now see people kind of developing ideas.

casting about for schedules, things to do, how to live if indeed our machines do get good or even better than us at certain tasks that we currently do at work.

And in order to give an answer to that question that does not, unlike Marx's, devolve into totalitarianism and repression, you have to have an idea about the point and purpose of your humanity, which I think is to glorify God and to know him continually. And in order to understand that, you have to get over your allergy to talking in those terms. So we really may be, in fact, reaching, as you sort of indicate, we might be reaching a crisis point where it's either that or

or a sort of abjection and despair, which I think is what you're seeing in a lot of

civilizations that are even further down this road than ours. I mean, I think of Japan, a country for which I have enormous affection and some affinity with the culture and language, but they're still more childless than we are. And their technology really has kind of taken this terrifying replacement level structure and

that's an example of a place where you've lost sight of what your humanity was for to begin with. It's a gift and it's a special charge that nothing can replace. But to recover that, you really do have to, I think, believe in some sort of higher power. So I want to move from here to some vulgar politics because obviously it's election season. And when it comes to the vulgar politics, it's

It's always so funny to talk with people who are deeply read in philosophy about politics because everybody sort of goes, what are you like? What is the relationship between A and B? Right. You're sitting around reading Greek philosophy and then you look at the presidential race and it's Donald Trump who certainly has not read Greek philosophy versus now. What are you saying? I'm sorry. I forgot he speaks Greek. Yeah, that's true. You've never seen him recite the Iliad. Yeah, exactly. So you've got Trump on the one hand, who, you know, is certainly no...

I would say philosophical scholar. And then you have Kamala Harris, on the other hand, who they will portray as a philosophical scholar, but certainly is also no philosophical scholar. And so what you end up

doing when you read philosophy or spend a lot of time with these thoughts is you end up sort of arguing over the very, very tip of the iceberg. It's like everything that's happening on the surface. And you have to explain to folks that what's happening at the very tip of the iceberg has extremely deep roots. So to take an example, the Democratic National Convention opened with a land acknowledgement. And so everybody sort of now takes this as rote, as though this is not a big deal. Why would you make a big deal out of this? But it actually says something quite fascinating and quite dark about the Democratic Party.

that they decided to open the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago with a land acknowledgement effectively suggesting that the United States, that Western civilization is illegitimate, that it stole the land of Chicago from the natives, and that the natives are the true owners of the land. And that should say something about whether maybe you should vote for a party that actually opens its proceedings with a land acknowledgement. I think that we are so fond of sort of picking up the sort of

very diluted version of the crap that's taught at universities. That if you, if you spend time at the universities, you know exactly what the thing is. You can, you can smell it and you know that it's bull. And if you're not, then you smell it. You're like, I'm not sure exactly what that is. And I've never, you know, I don't know exactly what I'm looking at here. Maybe you can talk about, you know, what politics is in the modern day as, and how it's tied into these deeper philosophies.

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, they say that if you're explaining, you're losing in politics, which is bad news for those of us that really love not only explaining, but having things explained to us. And I would say that this is half true. It's true on the campaign trail. And it's a good reason why I'm not running for office right now.

Right. I mean, if you're explaining in a stump speech, something's probably gone grievously wrong. And the other part of this is that if you're having fun, you're you're probably winning. And one of the most effective dimensions of of Trumpism and and

MAGA-ism for a while in its best forms has been the fun, the dancing, the rallies, which, as always, the Democrats do this with everything. They've now taken that, hollowed it out, drained it of its life and worn it as a skin suit. And they're trying to pretend that Kamala is basically like the female version of Trump dancing to the YMCA song.

I don't know how long that's going to work, but it shows you what kinds of dynamics are at play and the comparisons to like President Camacho in Idiocracy and the monster truck rally version of American politics are becoming more and more apt.

by the day. But there's a way in which explaining is not losing. And that's when we circle up among those of us that basically agree that the country's in dire straits, that the country needs rescuing, and that we need good strategies for doing that. I'm not going to make the stump speech, but...

You and I, in these sorts of conversations, are working out the understanding that is going to help us to pinpoint exactly the weakness of Kamala Harris. And it's through understanding the deeper roots of these things that we can kind of gather together our observations into something like a theory that makes sense. So, for instance, if you just turn on the TV and you see this like giant IUD sculpture and you see this Planned Parenthood statue.

Whatever. And you see like people dancing around and you're like Obama's on stage. It's all kind of a bit disorienting. And this is what like Plato would identify as the shadows on the cave. Right. This is like the most distant possible emanation of something which many, many miles away somewhere is real and authentic and true.

If you spend time in your off hours reflecting on philosophy and thinking about the deeper history that we talk about in Foundations of the West, you might gradually start to realize that actually the land acknowledgement and the IUD are profound.

profoundly connected at the roots because they both send the message, we shouldn't be here. We're not supposed to be here. We have no right to this country and we should probably die out. And this is where you start to see taking shape the vision of a culture of death.

And you see that as we start to talk about this stuff, you do get some political slogans out of it. Like a culture of death is a chilling and terrifying thing. And much like the truths of the founding, once you see it, you can't unsee it. So I think you're absolutely right when we react in the moment to these individual outrages, these flickers across the newsfeed, whatever tweet we saw last.

then we're running blind because we really are just kind of reacting to the latest possible bubble at the top of a very, very deep ocean. But when you spend time diving into the ocean, you can start to learn, I think, and understand how the bubbles are part of a current and how you potentially can make some sort of

motion to alter the way that things are going. And each of us is going to have a different role, right? Some of us are going to campaign. Some of us are going to talk and write. Some of us are going to run for office. But the thing that philosophy and history does for us, I suspect, in politics is it kind of gives us a second to take a breath, reorient before we get back into the fight. And that last step is really important because it's really easy and

extremely enjoyable to just spend all your time up in the clouds. But in the end, each of these highfalutin ideas does have a hard and fast concrete application in like, you're going to vote for A or B, who are you going to go with, of these very, very imperfect options. And I think those questions are easier to answer from a place of high principle. But in order to really execute, you have to descend from that place into the white knuckle boxing and mosh pit of politics. I'm sad to say.

I mean, to look at the other side of that, you know, I think that the philosophy of the Democrats at this point has actually become pretty clear and pretty open, a lot more than it was 20 years ago when they were obscuring a lot of their messages. Now Kamala Harris is trying to obscure some of her messages by changing her positions. But if you...

scratched the surface for more than half a second, you can see exactly what you're talking about, that this is a party that is effectively running on abortion. They were handing out free vasectomies at the DNC, that they are a party that has catered to the pro-Khamas wing of their own movement. It's pretty obvious exactly what they are, which is a cowardly iteration of a West that is in retreat. And that's in pretty much every iteration of every policy. What they're seeking is

effectively, civilizational hospice care. They're going to redistribute the resources of the civilization until we die out, but in the meantime, we'll have ourselves, you know, a fairly decent farewell party. And then you have the right side of the aisle. And the right side of the aisle is a mess. There's been an attempt to sort of treat

Trump as Trumpism, as though there's an actual MAGA movement, as opposed to Make America Great Again, which is, in fact, just, you know, an iteration of a political program that really does not have a ton of specificity to it. A lot of it has to do with people who just love Trump's affect, who are fascinated by what Donald Trump is as a human being, because he's an inherently fascinating person, obviously. And then there's been this attempt by a wide variety of philosophers to sort of craft a philosophy of Trumpism

out of Trump, which has always seemed chimeric to me. It's always seemed a little bit like there is no Dana only Zuul. Like, what are you doing? There is no Trumpism only Trump. Like, you can't really craft a philosophy around a person who doesn't really have a philosophy of his own. Trump has a set of impulses. I think that those impulses lie at the top

of a much more solid philosophy of civilization that he himself doesn't understand in the same way that most of our impulses politically are built on top of giant substructures that we don't understand, that we haven't investigated.

And, yeah, I think that's true of Trump, too. But, you know, you'll see arguments between West Coast drowsiness and East Coast drowsiness. What does Trump mean? Or you'll see Bronze Age mindset versus a sort of more Chris Ruffo attempt. What do all these things mean? When you look at the possibility of Trumpism, is there a Trumpism or is Trump just sort of the latest iteration of an anti-left movement that looks at what the left is doing and essentially says this cannot be?

Well, I would totally agree with you that it's probably a mistake to create a philosophy of Trump, but it might not be a mistake to create a philosophy about Trump. In other words, it's a failure of imagination to attribute to the man some kind of deep psychological –

situation where he's really playing 4D chess and he's got this grand theory of the case. Trump is telling us exactly what's going on 100% of the time, so far as I can tell. And I

In order to kind of preserve their picture of him as the great savior, there are some people that have tried to kind of repackage that as like a brilliant philosophical ploy. I don't think that's what's going on. I think Trump has basically always been a symptom.

He's been a symptom of the advanced stage of gridlock and decay that our political system had reached by 2016. And that included what you're describing on the left, which is this managed decline, these people that want us to go gently into that good night or even maybe help the process along a little bit so that the virtuous, I don't know, indigenous people or leopards or like nature can just take back over and everything will be

Another version, by the way, in its ultimate conclusions of that anti-human or transhuman philosophy, that it would be better if we didn't do the job of being human and something else did.

And so that's one thing that Trump is a reaction to or a symptom of. And then the other thing is a kind of inability on the part of certain elements on the right to really grapple with the seriousness and the dedication of that leftist movement.

And you did have for a while on the right these adjustments in tax policy that felt like putting lipstick on a pig. They felt like adjusting these little tiny fringe issues when really what we needed was a kind of upheaval and a full scale rejection, radical in the deepest sense that is going down to the roots of everything that's going on on the left. And all of the disputes that you're describing, which I think are totally valid and legitimate among different parties,

parts of the right, like the Chris Ruffos and the Bronze Age people and all that, anybody that's in that conversation is basically trying to hash out what the most effective way is and sustainable way is to accomplish that rejection of this leftist cancer that has sort of seeped its way into the roots of our politics. And the only response to the Trump symptom that doesn't seem to me legitimate is

is to pretend that it's not happening or to pretend that it comes from nowhere. The left likes to pretend that it's pure atavism, mere racism, sheer prejudice. Some people on the right, I think, like to pretend that he's just a populist demagogue that is waving his arms around so big and shouting so loud that everybody's following him. That's not true either. He tapped into something and he tapped into this longstanding discontent with civilizational decay. Now,

Within the right, the really interesting conversation, I think, is what's the proper response and how did we let it get this far? And the most interesting part of that conversation is, was it America itself in some sense that was always doomed to do this? There are obviously a million different varieties of this, but basically it's

Was this doomed to happen because of the structure of the founding itself, or was this kind of a perversion of American politics and ideology? And on that side, you've got like kind of the Deneens and the Integralists, and then on the –

Other side, you've got the Rufo's who say, no, this is America. America is actually well founded. It's still the best governmental technology that we have. We just it needs a serious update for the 21st century and a refurbishment and recovery. I'm on that side and I have yet to see anybody propose anything that would.

replace the regime as founded, replace the constitution, replace the founding documents that strikes me as an improvement rather than just a regression to strongman politics or to whatever other things, you know, have been proposed from time immemorial. So that's where I stand. And that's what I think is going on on the right right now that makes everything so chaotic.

Well, Spencer Clavin, his brand new book is Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith. It was released October 1st. Spencer, thanks so much for stopping by. Also check out Foundations, the West Terrific series. Really great to talk to you. It was a delight. Thanks for having me, Ben. The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp. Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

Thank you.

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