A passage that sticks in my mind from Scruton’s Soul book is where he describes listening to music, and the same idea holds in looking at a view, smelling something nice etc. etc.. The music can in a physical world sense be fully described by sound waves, frequencies, amplitudes etc. but what a person, as an individual, listening to the music experiences is something totally different, and how it makes them feel cannot be explained by the physical world. Both worlds are real but how is the second one explained – how did it come about? The Goodreads summary seems to miss this point. The book also frequently refers to the term intentionality and its manifestations not being explainable in physical terms.

Just looking at the Goodreads summary of the Scruton book.

> To be fully alive and to understand what we are is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life and what the final loss of the sacred would mean.

A book I was reading just yesterday talked about what it means to be sacred without God. Apparently, more people are starting to think of a sacredness or a sanctity that way. I’m one of them.

Evolution certainly can’t explain all that we are, but even atheists appreciate art, architecture, music, and literature.

I’ll give him a go!

They sound excellent, thank you. I’ll give them a go.