“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, god is waiting for you.” looking for books that explore a connection with the modern sciences and the mysticism of the universe.

Not about space, but connecting with the vastness of existence: The Biology of Transcendence, by Joseph Chilton Pearce. Also The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak— so well written, really connects with the mystery of non-human Neanderthals across 100 millennia and a different earth than we know. Mind-expanding!

Couple suggestions

Stranger in a strange land is one of the first that springs to mind. It’s a Jesus story, a boy is stranded on mars, ends up raised by psychic magical martians, and returns to earth to spread wisdom and peace. I think the martians themselves are one of the coolest things about the book. They are basically gods, they can create matter out of thought. But they aren’t like some hyper advanced utopia, they live in harmony with the way they evolved.

It’s from the late fifties so it has some issues from a social perspective, which it gets criticized for a lot. The writing of women isn’t the best, and the MC straight up disregards homosexual people, saying they aren’t bad but they are confused. It was ahead of its time when it came out though, and the author had some pretty accurate predictions about the hippie movement, and he came around about gay folks when he was older.

Two more, one leaning more towards the mystical and one more towards the material.

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe. Three book series, set so far in the future that the sun is starting to shift to its next phase. At some point, humanity advanced far enough to create technology that seems to be more or less magic. But at the current time, humanity is deeply stratified economically, socially, and technologically. We have returned to monarchism, and knowledge is strictly guarded and controlled by guilds. The vast majority of people live like medieval peasants, and it seems like most of the technology that has been preserved is that which is useful for warfare or control. People fight wars with energy weapons but still plow their fields by hand. Many of the guilds know how to make this technology but the knowledge of the underlying principals has been lost or destroyed. We have FTL travel, and it’s kind of generally known that humanity has other colonies, and is in contact with aliens, but only the highest echelons of society know any specifics about that. It’s not clear if earth has been disregarded by most of humanity, or if it’s being managed by aliens, or if it’s some kind of preserve. Warhammer 40k definitely cribbed a lot of stuff from Gene Wolfe if you are familiar with that setting, but his world is a lot more thought out/ complicated.

Wolfe was a hardcore catholic, and a lot of that imagery makes it into the story, as well as some moments, like satan tempting Jesus overlooking the desert, are directly rehashed. If your a word nerd there’s tons of fun stuff in there, he repurposes old Latin words to mean new things. If you read it, look up any words your unfamiliar with, don’t rely on context. And look up every characters name as well. Beyond the Christian imagery and kinda loosely goosey mystical magic, it has a lot to say about what the purpose of life is, and if the idea of utopia is even valid for us. Can humans ever reach a point where all things are static and no one suffers? If they did, would they still be human? If not, does that mean human existence, by nature, is a cycle of violence and rebirth?

Last one is a lot more grounded, kinda. Permutation City by Greg Egan is set in the first generation where digital immortality becomes possible. You can upload yourself and live potentially forever, but it’s currently only available to the ultra wealthy, as the processor time is super expensive, and at the start of the story it’s just starting to become accessible to the upper middle class. One of the main characters has a plan to access unlimited computational power.

Doesn’t sound too mystical, right? Well his plan is to run the computations on the universe itself. He believes that the universe consists of everything in the mathematical possibility space. There are other pockets of the universe with totally different physics, or the way that things interact with each other bears no relation to what we call physics. So long as it can be traced back to first principals, everything that can be, is, somewhere. He also believes that simulations that are sufficiently advanced/ include conscious beings take on a life of their own. If they are interrupted, they don’t stop, they keep running somewhere else. The problem is there is no way to prove it. The story mixes some really down to earth ideas with huge ideas about how the universe works. It also has a ton of fun characters who all have distinct reasons for wanting to be involved in his project.