Science and Spiritual Practices

Why is beauty so important to scientists, even those without religious convictions? And is that in some way connected to the failure of New Atheism, which began two decades ago this year? Rupert’s two books on science and spiritual practices inform the conversation, as does research by Guy Hayward, Linda Woodhead, Simon Conway Morris, Micheal Levin and a team led by Fraser Watts. Why is providence such a powerful intuition? And might related matters have anything to do with the extraordinary power of Large Language Models? 0:00 V: Spiritual practice trials 4:27 S: Singing together 7:54 V: Music and enchantment 10:00 V: New Atheism and providence 12:46 S: Providence or blind chance? 14:22 V: Scientists and beauty 16:47 S: Gratuitous beauty in nature 20:22 V: Evolution as search engine 22:20 S: Platonism and morphic resonance 26:00 V: Why are LLMs so good? 30:20 S: Language conveys experience 31:59 V: Closing thanks