Hi Sunday,
I have not read any of his books, but I did discover him and go through a "Rupert Sheldrake Phase" a few years ago, where I basically listened to everything I could find by him on Youtube and read as much as I could find online (i.e., the cheap route to basic knowledge). I found his ideas to be extremely interesting and largely convincing--in the sense that they represented something that is currently missing in naturalistic science, which continues to flounder as it tries to explain everything in the universe out of a solely materialistic paradigm.
However, in the end, it seemed to me that he was still hampered by a limitation in his thinking. Truly, he did do a better job using "morphic fields" to supplement and complement naturalistic science, in coming up with a "TOE" (Theory of Everything), but I had a feeling that in the end he was (like materialistic science) trying to shoehorn everything into an inherently insufficient theory. I.e., materialistic science expanded to include morphic fields still seemed largely naturalistic and insufficient to me.
To the respectable materialist scientist, God and spirituality and religious experience is the product of "the lizard brain" or perhaps chemicals in the brain (DMT), or psychological phenomena, or ?? (just so long as it fits into the materialist paradigm). It seemed to me at some point that Sheldrake was moving towards explaining the truly supernatural (GOD) in much the same way, by just adding morphic fields to the materialist paradigm. Consequently, my concern was that Sheldrake was just adding another layer to the naturalistic paradigm. Adding the preternatural to the natural has tremendous explanatory value, and adds greatly to our understanding of the "big picture". But it still denies the supernatural.
Now, I could be wrong, as my efforts were strictly peremptory and limited. So, I will look forward to getting your "take" on the matter.
Cordially,
S&S
