A Book for Burning, with Jonas Atlas

Rupert speaks with Jonas Atlas about the high cost of scientific heresy and what it reveals about the gap between science's public face and its private reality. Beginning with the 1981 Nature editorial that branded A New Science of Life "a book for burning," they trace how Rupert was effectively excommunicated from mainstream science, then turn to deeper questions: how to tell genuine inquiry from pseudoscience in a "post-truth" age flooded with AI-generated theories of everything, why morphic resonance remains a hypothesis to be tested rather than a truth to be defended, and why survey evidence suggests hardcore materialism is actually a minority view among working scientists who mostly stay quiet about it.

First published on the Re-visioning Religion podcast, Sep 02, 2025.

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/re-visioning-religion/

About Jonas: A scholar of religion, teaching at KDG University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Jonas is also an independent researcher at the Radboud University, as a member of the Race, Religion and Secularism network.