Philosopher Tim Freke’s, Soul Story offers a worldview beyond science and religion.

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On this episode of Skeptiko…

Alex Tsakiris: …you’re talking about a deep evolution, a spiritual evolution, and I get that, I just don’t know that we can connect it with the dorky, neo-Darwinistic bullshit that we’ve been fed…

Tim Freke: My approach is look, there does seem to be the fact of biological evolution, whatever the mechanisms, however we come to understand that.. Then a hundred years ago something amazing happened with big bang theory, when we went, “Look, it’s not just life, it’s not just biology which has evolved, it’s the whole universe has evolved over 13.8 billion years.”

… so, this period where we could argue about the biological mechanisms is only the tail end anyway, I mean, clearly evolution can’t be about genetics only because there was no genetics when there was the evolution of basic gases, there was nothing. So the evolutionary process is much bigger than any biological evolutionary process.

Stay with us for Skeptiko…

Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode Tim Freke joins us to talk about his new book: Soul Story: Evolution and The Purpose of Life

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Read Excerpts:

Alex Tsakiris:

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s give people the basic premise of this ambiguity that you tap into and I think so many people feel and experience between living in a scientific, technology-driven world and yet being drawn to the magical and the mystical part of life, I mean, frame that up, the basic premise.

Tim Freke: Well I think, you know, I became a philosopher when I was very young because I wanted to understand my life, and here I am much older and I’m still trying to do the same thing and I want to understand my life as I actually experience it and the way I experience life is very ambiguous; on the one hand I clearly live in a reality which I need to understand in a cause and effect way. When I drop something, it falls and there’s kind of, almost a brutal causality to the world and there’s a level in which it feels pretty chaotic and meaningless, on the one hand. But on the other hand I also experience life to be intensely magical, full of what people often call synchronicities, but those moments when meaning breaks out, when I explored the awakened state, which has been my preoccupation for most of my life. There’s a profound sense that this journey which we’re on is incredibly important, it has deep purpose and somehow I need to come up with a way of understanding the whole scope of reality, which can incorporate both of those.

For a long time, I think like many people, I’ve just lived with the ambiguity and tried to ignore it, but as a philosopher, over the 10, 20 years I just can’t do that, I’ve needed to go, look, is there a way in which we can understand this, which honors both of those experiences, which incorporates my experience of life in the way that science address it, but also my experience of life in the way that spirituality addresses it?