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Hunger for Wholeness
Story matters. Our lives are shaped around immersive, powerful stories that thrive at the heart of our religious traditions, scientific inquiries, and cultural landscapes. As Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein claimed, science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. This podcast will hear from speakers in interdisciplinary fields of science and religion who are finding answers for how to live wholistic lives. This podcast is made possible by funding from the Fetzer Institute. We are very grateful for their generosity and support. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSC; Optical: NASA/STScI [M. Meixner]/ESA/NRAO [T.A. Rector]; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/K.)
Hunger for Wholeness
Evolution, Biology and Spirituality with Rupert Sheldrake (Part 2)
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In Part 2, Ilia, Robert and Rupert discuss evolution, faith and Rupert’s Anglican spirituality. They ask how religion and science can work together in a more integrated framework, and Rupert has the last word on how our quest for digital immortality is coming full circle.
ABOUT RUPERT SHELDRAKE
“I'd see the evolutionary processes as interplay between two fundamental principles, namely habits and creativity.”
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 90 scientific papers and nine books, and the co-author of six books. His books have been published in 28 languages. He was among the top 100 Global Thought Leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute, Zurich, Switzerland's leading think tank. For ten years running he has been recognized as one of the “most spiritually influential living people in the world” by Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine. His work has been featured in many magazines, newspapers and broadcast media, including New Scientist, The Guardian, Discover magazine, The Spectator, The Washington Post, Die Zeit and on BBC radio and television.
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Rupert: Well, just one final point on that. You know that Alan Turing, who was one of the great inventors of modern computing, Alan Turing was gay. And he had a young friend called Christopher who died at the age of 17 or 18 or something. He was obsessed. He became obsessed with the question of physical immortality, even though he was a kind of atheistic materialist to start with. And one of Turing's ideas was that if you can distinguish between the software of a computer and the hardware, what we now call the software and the hardware, you could take the software from one computer and put it in another and it would go on functioning in that other, but it was a bit like reincarnation, and the software would provide a model of potentially immortality in a machine form. And the reason he was so fascinated, because he was so preoccupied with trying to find a way in which his beloved friend would not be extinguished forever. And so, computerized immortality, in fact, what's now the commonplace sanction of software and hardware was Turings way and part of his motivation, in fact, for his ideas about computing. So, the discussion of digital immortality in a sense is coming back to one of the very first steps in the history of computing.