McKenzie Wark, in an online article, writes this about Joseph Needham:
“…Needham saw religion as an indisputable domain of social feeling, a kind of collective experience of the numinous, which might be thought of as the radically other and inexplicable aspect of the universe. For Needham religion was a practice of human solidarity, in and against that otherness… [He] identified himself… with a sense of the early Christians as a popular, revolutionary force, inspired by a sense of driving justice”
[Wark, “Joseph Needham, The Great Amphibian”, (publicseminar.org)].
I would add that such views about a radically other and inexplicable universe were shared by some other scientists, such as Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, as well as a number of philosophers.