Dr. Chris White Optimistic About Science Spirituality Crossover |402|

Dr. Christopher White traces multidimensional science concepts through spiritual thinking.

photo by: Skeptiko

I keep having these vivid dreams like thinking weird things.

What sorts of things?

If you’re watching any popular TV shows or movies about the future of technology, like this clip from Netflix is Black Mirror, you know the future.

Your fate is being dictated. You’re not in control.

And you know it’s not very good.

Today’s guest look past the dystopia and sees something else.

Alex Tsakiris: Where you were going and reaching towards with the shared near-death experience and Raymond Moody and the higher-ordered geometry, is there the possibility to actually imagine a higher-ordered science that already exists and then where does that take us?

Chris White: Well, maybe. Certainly, one thing that you find, when you study the history of science in the last 150 years, is that scientists have been pretty committed to policing the boundaries of their disciplines. One thing that they rule out is any kind of philosophical or even spiritual reflection, right?

You see that, in my first book that I mentioned earlier, it looked pretty closely at the history of social sciences, you know, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, science is a mind and brain. And one thing that the founders of those disciplines really work hard at is squeezing out any mention of any kind of spiritual thing, or any, even philosophical questions.

Maybe you’re right, that in the future, when scientists and social scientists are less allergic to or less afraid of thinking about these other orders of existence or thinking about spirit, maybe that opens up a whole new way of thinking about and doing science.

I really enjoyed having Dr Chris White on Skeptiko today and we talked about other topics like whether much of this dark, dark dystopic, apocalyptic science stuff is socially engineered… is designed to make us feel even more isolated, afraid, alone? It certainly keeps us away from any kind of deeper examination of spirituality.

So, it’s a great chat with a very distinguished and deep thinker. Stick around for my interview with Chris White.

 Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Dr Christopher G White to Skeptiko. He’s here to talk about his new book, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions.

Now, I don’t usually read a lot of book blurbs on this show, but this is a really good one. So, let me read this in, because it will give you an idea of where he’s coming from.

“For a long time people have argued that the rise of science has caused the decline of religion. Other Worlds, this book, presents a different perspective, showing that modern Europeans and Americans often use scientific ideas in imaginative ways to develop new enchanted views of nature. The book examines the history and imaginative power of one scientific idea in particular, an idea that has been crucial to modern physics, as well as modern science fiction, and that is the idea that the universe has a higher invisible dimension.”

Very, very nice. I should also mention, real quickly, that Chris, I’m going to call him Chris here, has a PhD from Harvard and is Professor and Chair of Religion at Vassar, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the United States....