Abstract

In this essay I argue that the perceived conflict between religion and science arises from a mistaken, reductive notion of ultimate truth as mere propositional correctness, the result of lingering metaphysical dualism (the idea of an unchanging realm gives reality to what-is). Drawing on Aristotle, Heidegger, and Ricœur, I contend that truth is better understood as the “event of ongoing disclosure” (fundamental truth) rather than a fixed object to be mastered in an exhaustive propositional representation of that truth. The latter is necessary to human life but poses a grave danger in that it tends toward becoming the only mode through which we understand the disclosure of what-is. Further, I argue that the language of religion is that of practical wisdom, of “know-how” for faithful living through interpretation, narrative, and continual rereading—that, rather than a language that aims at correct propositional representation, makes human life and values continue to be possible. From this perspective, scientific and religious languages are incommensurable but non-competing responses to the same reality. Science discloses truth through explanation and control, while scripture reveals truth as divine disclosure, wisdom. Scripture offers a viable alternative to technological domination without opposing scientific truth.

Introduction

Many Christians and other believers have little to no difficulty reconciling their religious beliefs and practices with current scientific explanations of the things and events in the world. Yet a significant number do have trouble. For some the biblical story of Creation is impossible to accommodate to the scientific teachings about evolution. Many religious people disagree with science about the nature of human consciousness: For them it is a divinely endowed spirit, not an emergent property in the evolution of the brain. But the tension between those who are religious and scientists isn’t only in the province of so-called conservative believers. Perhaps the tension that looms largest, though most often only lurking in the background, is that of change. Since the early twentieth century, physicists have argued that there is no objective basis for the reality of becoming.1 But Christian salvation requires that it must be possible for the old person to become the new, for the old world to become new. (See, for example, John 3:3–5.) If there is no change, no becoming, then those distinctions are unreal and Zion, to say nothing of salvation, is meaningless.

In my experience, when Latter-day Saints think about these tensions, they often rely on Joseph Smith’s teaching about spirit and matter to avoid them. He taught: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131:7). Assuming that the word material in the verse refers to material in its not-well-defined ordinary sense rather than a theoretical sense, the verse tells us that even some things that we assume to be immaterial, such as spirit, are material. But we cannot overlook the fact that describing the material of spirits as “more fine or pure” leaves us in the dark as to how to think about it. As well, contrary to what many Latter-day Saints assume, unless the only two categories of what-is are matter and the undefined category of spirit, the revelation does not tell us that everything is material. For example, it doesn’t say that concepts are material.2 So, contrary to what some Latter-day Saints, including me, have believed, the verse does not offer strong evidence for resisting traditional dualisms that divide what-is into two distinct metaphysical realms, spirit and nature.

I suspect that my overinterpretation of Smith’s words are the result of having been influenced by a philosophical and theological movement that began at least in the late nineteenth century and continues today—the rejection of metaphysical dualism. For metaphysical dualists, there are two realms of what-is: the realm of human experience, which is a realm of change, and the unchanging realm of things that give our experience reality. In Christian terms, these are often thought of as the world and the body, on one hand, and God or the realm of God on the other. Though I can no longer cite Doctrine and Covenants 131 to support my rejection of that kind of dualism, I reject it nonetheless. An account of why will turn out also to be an account of why religious language and scientific language are incommensurable with each other and not in tension.

Perhaps the most obvious origin of the rejection of contemporary metaphysical dualism (a rejection agreed with by not only non-believers, but also by believers) is to be found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. He argued that though the Christian philosophical foundation of Western culture had served it well, that foundation had crumbled:

1. Through Christianity, Western culture had built a metaphysical structure to hide its lack of foundation: Together, the world of the impassible and never-changing god (adopted from Greek philosophy) and the human world that mirrored the static god served as the grounds for explaining the world and human life.3

2. That two-world structure served us well for most of two millennia, but by the late nineteenth century, the supposed interrelation of the divine and human realms no longer functioned to serve Western culture well, and nothing had taken its place. Life and the world had come to be, literally, absurd: off-key, deaf to lived, truth-full human life.

3. In other words, over time the metaphysical structure on which Western culture was built had corroded to meaninglessness even though most people either did not see or ignored that meaninglessness. They continued on pretending that nothing had changed, though the decay of society said otherwise.

Obviously, not everyone—if many at all—agreed with Nietzsche during his lifetime. Few saw the West as in decay or in crisis because what they assumed to be God and his realm no longer structured what-is. Most denied that crisis, or “the death of God,”4 which meant the inability of the god of metaphysics to be the foundation for human life. For many, especially the more-educated, science purported to fill the gap left open by that loss, yet in spite of itself, contributed to the gap’s widening. That attempted replacement for the metaphysical god created the tensions we still see between the languages of science and religion.5 Nietzsche’s argument had little effect until the middle of the twentieth century, when many European philosophers began to respond to his thinking, among them Martin Heidegger (though Heidegger’s response to Nietzsche mostly came after the publication of his major work, Being and Time.)

My purpose in this essay is to argue that Latter-day Saint teaching gives us a response to Nietzsche’s critique, a response in which we acknowledge the critique as valid but offer a religious and non-dualistic understanding of our accounts of what-is that avoids his critique. Doctrine and Covenants 131 at least weakly implies that is possible. Properly understood, such an alternative understanding makes it possible to undo the tensions between the languages of religion and science: They are not rival accounts of what-is (including human being), but equally valid responses (among other equally valid responses) to what-is. Each offers a way of speaking truthfully about an under-determined what-is.

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Introduction

The front page of my evolution course webpage shows a meme of a stern-looking Galápagos iguana with the caption “You are the product of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.”

As a professor, I begin and end every semester with the same reminder to my students: Be a good mammal. Good mammals take care of themselves, one another, and their planet. It sounds simple, but it carries the weight of both evolutionary history and theological meaning. Though humans are a young species, we inherit the evolutionary wisdom of mammals—warm-blooded, social, adaptable beings whose survival depends on cooperation, care, and ecological reciprocity. This is not sentiment; it’s biology. And it’s also scripture. Latter-day Saint theology names the same pattern stewardship—to see the body as temple, the community as covenant, and the Earth as a living partner. To be a good mammal is not merely biology. It is a theology of stewardship.

Evolution is the ongoing creation story, the universe still speaking itself into being. The same forces that shaped iguanas and birds and sea lions on volcanic islands shaped us, too. Cooperation, adaptation, and ecological reciprocity are not accidents of natural history; they are the scaffolding of life. Mammals learned early that survival is a communal act, that thriving requires relationships. In this light, stewardship and evolution are not opposites but reflections of the same truth: Life endures through connection, through care, through love disguised as biology. Our role in that story is both simple and demanding—to take care.

Stewardship is the sacred form of that truth, the theology that grows from the science. Its practice unfolds in three directions: care of self, care of others, and care of the Earth. Each is a covenant, and together they describe what it means to be a good mammal.

Good mammals take care of themselves.

Care begins close in with the body, that small ecosystem of breath and boundary. Mammals know that neglecting the body endangers the whole herd. To rest, to nourish, to move, to heal . . . these are not luxuries but acts of ecological responsibility. In Latter-day Saint language, the body is a temple. In evolutionary terms, it is our first habitat. To tend it well is an offering to both biology and divinity.

To bring this closer to home, I will tell you a story. A dreadful thing happened to me at age forty-three: I got dead drunk, entirely by accident. My husband and I were on vacation in Mexico, fresh from a morning of hiking Mayan ruins in the dark-green jungle. While he went off for a nap, I settled by the beachside pool and ordered the minty, ice-cold coconut drink I’d grown fond of. I assumed it was from the “family-friendly” menu, but a language barrier and my own naivete conspired for a different result. Thirsty from the heat, I drank three tall glasses quickly, unaware that the sweetness was masking a healthy pour of rum.

In short order, the world tilted. Dizzy and confused, I called my husband in a panic, convinced I had sunstroke or worse. With a few questions, he diagnosed the true issue, laughed heartily, and came to collect my sorry, tipsy self from the pool. I learned a few lessons that day: first, that the Word of Wisdom holds up well, and second, that wisdom itself may need updating for the modern mammal.

We may not drink much rum by accident, but we do live intoxicated by busyness, sugar, stress, and neglect. The covenant of care should maybe ask harder questions now: Do you eat enough leafy greens? Limit sugar? Move your body? Get your medical checkups? Protect your skin? Vaccinate? Floss? And, perhaps most sacred of all, are you caring for your mind—that evolutionary wonder that made us what we are? Without it, we’re slow-running, clawless snacks on the savanna; with it, we’ve become caretakers of worlds.

To be a good mammal is to care for yourself without apology. Honor your body as sacred matter, evolved and sustained by Earth. Every breath, every bite, every heartbeat ties us back to soil, sea, and starlight. Remember that, and half of theology resolves itself.

Good mammals take care of one another.

No mammal thrives alone. From the earliest social species to human communities, cooperation has always been the strategy of survival. Mutual care is the oldest covenant, written not just in scripture but in shared breath and warmth. In this light, neighbor love and kin selection speak the same truth: We are built for connection. To take care of each other is to practice the evolutionary art of belonging and to glimpse Zion in miniature.

Once, I held a stranded hummingbird in my hand and felt its featherlight tongue drink sugar water from my fingertips. I whispered to the fragile, frightened creature, “You are safe. It will be OK. I will not hurt you.” When it finally gathered enough strength to fluff its wings and buzz away, I was left in stillness and full of wonder.

In that moment, I understood what my research keeps teaching me: Care is the oldest language on Earth. In the way pollinators cooperate with their floral partners, in the way herds shelter their young, the pattern repeats—life depending on life. Cooperation isn’t a lofty theory; it’s the quiet engine of existence.

From a scholarly lens, both evolution and theology tell this same story. Evolution’s cooperative mechanisms—mutualism, adaptation, resilience—mirror the moral architecture of Zion. Both depend on shared care across scales of being. In the Latter-day Saint context, continuing revelation works like ecological adaptation: a living system learning, refining, expanding through relationship. To be a good mammal is to live inside that process with awareness and to recognize that the laws of survival and the laws of love have always been the same. Though this might seem in conflict, perhaps even a paradox, understanding science makes space for it all.

Watching the pollinators and their floral partners, I’m reminded that life itself is a long conversation of giving and receiving. Every creature survives by tending to another. Humans are no exception; our thriving depends on how faithfully we honor that same covenant of care.

The old biblical question still hangs in the air: Am I my brother’s keeper? The answer has never changed. Yes. We are. We are herd animals, evolutionarily adapted to belong. Civilization’s morality can still be measured by how it treats its young, its elderly, its vulnerable. Tribalism carried us far, driving invention, identity, and culture, and yet the same instinct now fractures us. It is time for a new story, one that expands the circle of our human tribe until no one stands outside it, one species bound by shared breath and shared responsibility.

It’s a lesson our own people tried to live. I was never one to get misty about pioneer stories—too much dust, too many bonnets, too much tuberculosis, and more hymn singing than any sane person could stand. I used to think my Mormon ancestors were reckless and a bit foolish to leave civilization and go West, probably a little gullible to follow men who promised heaven in the desert. But they were also idealists—people who believed in something so fiercely that they left comfort behind with a vision and a hope that life could be better. The very best reason, the most inspiring reason, to go into the wilderness: to fight for a better world.

They believed in Zion. “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18). I believe in that too. That is a world worth fighting for, hoping for, reaching for.

Now I see my ancestors differently. They are precious to me. They were evolution in motion, humans daring to imagine a more cooperative future. That same drive—to build a just, caring community—remains the heart of sacred stewardship.

Zion, like any ecosystem, must adapt or die. It is not somewhere we go but something we make. It is a living process built each time a community chooses generosity over scarcity, connection over fear. We are meant to flourish together. To be a good mammal is to remember that Zion doesn’t end at the edge of the campfire or the chapel. It extends into the soil, the rivers, the air we share. Zion is not a distant city; it’s a living process, a verb disguised as a noun.

Good mammals take care of their planet.

Every act of life depends on the generosity of the planet—its air, soil, water, and light. To care for Earth is not an abstract environmental duty, it is the continuation of our own survival story. Earth is our shared body, our mother, our oldest covenant partner. Stewardship, in this sense, is simply remembering what mammals have always known: that care is reciprocal. The planet sustains us only as well as we sustain it.

About 3.8 billion years ago (as the iguana meme so helpfully reminds my students), in a daring and audacious move, the first cells twitched to life. They carried genetic code and an unrelenting directive: survive and reproduce. From that spark onward, evolution took the reins—life experimenting, diversifying, filling the planet with improbable abundance. At least five times, extinction scoured the slate nearly clean. Five times, life began again, persistent in its pursuit of biodiversity.

And now, here we are. A strange young species called Homo sapiens, armed with a never-before-seen brain and a dangerous knack for storytelling, perched at the top of a web we barely understand. But our ecosystem is not a hierarchy. It’s a body. If the web collapses, so do we. Earth has endured those mass extinctions. The top predators never make it through. Take the lesson. Saving biodiversity isn’t charity. It’s self-preservation.

My oldest son, Jack, took an early stab at ethical coexistence with life on this planet. At five years old—a good mammal, testing out his first moral narratives—he announced that he would no longer eat mammals. When pressed for his reasoning, he proclaimed, “Because I am a mammal, so I will not eat the others.” I honored his sound logic. It lasted two months. Then Grandpa visited and made bacon. Fair. Many of us have surrendered nobler intentions to the lure of bacon.

Still, I was struck by his clarity. Even at that age, Jack understood something most of us forget: that we are part of the web we consume and that belonging carries responsibility.

That same truth runs through the world’s sacred texts. In Annie Dillard’s poetic rendering of a verse from the Qur’an, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between—thinkest thou I made them in jest?” (Surah 21:16, quoted in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Genesis 2:15 echoes, “The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” This was never ownership. It was trust and stewardship. We do not possess Earth; we are responsible for it. And there will be an accounting, to our God, to our descendants, to our own souls.

But suppose the Master Gardener has returned, and the first question of the millennial interview is “So . . . how is Earth? How is my glorious creation?”

I imagine myself standing there, hands twisted together, wishing for better news. “Lord,” I’d have to say softly, “we lost some things . . . the tigers, the elephants, the whales . . . and more beauty than I can name.”

I hope I never have to say that.

Caring for the planet is not a side project or a sentimental virtue. It is a covenantal duty. Reverence made practical. Stewardship is responsibility without dominion, care without conquest. Earth was never given as property, but entrusted as inheritance: sacred, fragile, alive.

Do we see our planet as a covenant partner? The way we answer will tell the story of our souls. To honor creation is to honor its Creator.

To practice the spirit of collaboration, I’ll invoke other brilliant, sacred minds on our spiritual mandate to be responsible stewards. E. O. Wilson, a great naturalist and advocate for Earth, said in his book Consilience that he believed the world needed a new environmental ethic where science and religion could be united around the shared purpose of conservation. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote. “They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.”

The Prophet Joseph Smith said much the same thing in his own language of revelation, often quoting Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Both men knew that without a living sense of purpose and a story large enough to hold us, humanity loses its way.

Science tells the story of deep time; revelation tells the story of divine purpose. Put them together, and you get a vision large enough to live inside—a sacred narrative of stewardship, kinship, and care. Earth’s covenant and our own are the same promise: to protect what gives us life, to make beauty where we can, to keep faith with the living world.

Conclusion

Genesis 1:31 ends the creation story with the quiet declaration, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” It is good. Scripture says so, and I believe it.

Earth is good. You are part of that creation; therefore, you are created good. That blessing was sealed upon all living things. What remains is our choice: What will we do with that goodness? I have hope that we can be good mammals.

Creation didn’t end at Eden. It continues in every act of care: when we tend our bodies as sacred, when we make kin of strangers, when we guard Earth as a covenant partner. Zion is not yet found, but we glimpse it, reach for it, and bring it closer with each breath, each act of hope, each piece of work well done. To call on one last voice, I offer a statement by environmental activist Anthony D. Williams:

We are here to heal, not harm.
We are here to love, not hate.
We are here to create, not destroy.

Be a good mammal.

Take care of yourself, one another, and your planet.

In doing so, you join the Creator in the oldest, most beautiful work there is: the ongoing creation of a world worth saving.

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Kyra is a Professor of Biology and Program Director for the Sustainability Program at Maryville University, and a Research Associate at Missouri Botanical Garden. Kyra is a St. Louis Biodiversity Fellow in the Living Earth Collaborative. She did her BS and MS at Brigham Young University. Kyra did her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. She was Science Educator of the Year by the STL Academy of Science in 2016. Her lab focuses on the need to understand the dynamics of the natural world in a changing environment. You can find her TEDx talk from 2015 under “Plants, People and Pollinators: A Love Story.”

Art by Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920).

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In the summer hills behind my maternal grandparents’ home in Southern California, the earth pleads for water like lips, cracked and gaping. Yet the same baked land is home to orange trees from which my grandpa would prepare fresh-squeezed orange juice during our annual family visits. There was nothing more heavenly—like sun-kissed honey ambrosia.

Once my husband and I brought our own children for a visit. On a walk to the eucalyptus tree (or “euca-lipstick” tree, as my young cousin called it), we discovered a brutal scene.

A venomous tarantula hawk wasp, its translucent rust-colored wings held erect by gangly appendages, was dragging its prey along the dirt—an immobilized, hairy tarantula that jerked over the uneven ground like a rubber toy.

Second only to the bullet ant, the stings of these monstrous wasps are ranked most painful in the vast insect world—described by one researcher as “immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline,” the researcher continued, “simply does not work in these situations.”

But the wasp’s prey of choice, the tarantula, has an even more horrifying fate than these poor souls. The female wasp wrestles with its victim, grasping it with long, hooked claws and stinging it between the legs. The tarantula is paralyzed and is then dragged by the wasp to a house of horrors—a lair in which the wasp lays a single egg on the still-living tarantula’s abdomen. After hatching, the larva digs its way down into the tarantula, feeding insatiably upon it, while bypassing vital organs in order to keep its feast alive as long as possible.

On that day, I was still unaware of the notorious sting, so I unwittingly scooped the creatures up—attached predator and all—in a torn plastic water bottle and froze them next to my grandma’s Eggo waffles. Once home in Utah, my son preserved them as part of his eighth-grade biology insect collection. Last I heard, both the insect predator and the arachnid prey were displayed on his biology teacher’s Wall of Fame.

And the cycle of life continues.

It’s relatively easy to find grace and God in some places—fresh-squeezed orange juice, mountain streams, songbirds, coral reefs, laughter, double rainbows, and tangerine sunsets. My childhood crayon drawings are proof enough for me.

But where is God in the gruesome, ugly tarantula hawk wasp burrows? Where is grace in the painful, distressing, soul-wrenching dark nights?

My evolution professor once related Charles Darwin’s dark night of the soul and his transition from a Christian to an agnostic. It did not come, as many assume, solely embedded in his theory of evolution by natural selection—his competitive, dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest species survive.

Rather, some believe, it began with the death of his beloved ten-year-old daughter, Annie. Darwin wrote that his daughter had been “the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age.” Just a week after her tragic death, following months of mysterious illness, Darwin wrote of his Annie, “She must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face.”

Darwin was too grief-stricken to even attend the funeral.

It’s the age-old problem of theodicy. How can we reconcile God’s providence in the face of evil and pain? Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this question for centuries, while everyday seekers live out this wrestle time and again.

My own dark night of the soul has frequently reared its ugly head in the form of chronic illness. It began just shy of twenty years ago, when I awoke at night to use the bathroom and discovered it hurt to walk. It was as if someone had been hammering the tops of my feet in the night while I slept—some deranged little elf on a sadistic mission.

In the morning and as the day progressed, the pain would dissipate. But at night, the phantom would return for his nightly poundings. It was bizarre, because I couldn’t trace the pain to an injury and because it didn’t follow the predictable pattern of pain (more intense, then less, then gone). Rather, it would come and go, sometimes reappearing in a different location, sometimes increasing rather than decreasing in intensity. It was haphazard and unsettling.

Since the diagnostic protocol looked not just at lab tests or imaging but at a full clinical picture over time, it took several years to receive the eventual diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an autoimmune disease that frequently affects joints. In autoimmune disease, the immune system is in overdrive. It detects pollen—attack! Peanuts—attack! Any number of other benign triggers—attack! It may even be bored due to our hypersanitized world—attack! Like other autoimmune diseases, RA warps the immune system into a trigger-happy mania that causes collateral damage as it fights against nonexistent enemies. Detonating its arsenal against vague shadows on the wall, it leaves a broken battleground in its wake—my body. And there is no cure.

In addition to my feet, other joints became affected in the initial years—fingers, wrists, knees, and shoulders. I remember those cursed little onesie snaps during my son’s nighttime diaper changes—how absurdly painful it was to pinch those snaps closed. Or lifting my arms slowly above my head to put on a shirt, wincing as my shoulders burned. Or doorknobs—those brilliant little inventions that keep young toddlers out of forbidden areas, but which at times required one hand bracing the other to ease the twisting in my throbbing wrist.

In addition to pain, there is frequently a dragging fatigue associated with autoimmune illness—as if you have ankle and arm weights as you walk through a sea of Jell-O wherever you go. Simple tasks take longer. They’re harder. It feels like the day after you’ve had the flu, when you’re achy and beat, but every day is Groundhog Day, and that day never ends.

Of course, the whole disease ebbs and flows, and some months or years are better than others. In my case, it has warped into a distinct but related autoimmune disease called scleroderma. Whereas rheumatoid arthritis frequently attacks joints, scleroderma targets the skin. The name scleroderma means “thick skin,” which describes the thickened skin that affects many sufferers. But like rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma causes pain and fatigue. It can also attack inner organs, becoming life-threatening if it decides to battle it out with organs such as the heart or lungs. It’s a confusing disease both because of its varied manifestations and its uncertain course.

Lately, it’s my muscles that cause me the most pain. I don’t know if it’s due to a different disease altogether, a side effect from medication, or an unusual manifestation of my growing list of diagnoses. It seems like a paradoxical response to pain, but many days there is nothing I would like more than that little maniacal elf to come back with his hammer and pound my muscles into oblivion. Wrestling with chronic disease often means wrestling with a language problem. I can’t go to my doctor and say it hurts here, and then point to my whole body. I can’t say, please doc, just send me to someone who will squeeze the deep aching from my arms and legs like toothpaste. Please just fix me.

Sometimes, in my dark nights, I pray God would swoop down and take me for a heavenly field trip—not a permanent one, mind you, but just a brief breather. Just for one day.

It’s tempting to wallow in an immature self-pity—turning into myself, becoming caged with only my own suffering. But this is not who I want to be. Another inclination is to downplay my own suffering because many have it so much worse: horrific abuse, loneliness, betrayal, slavery, gnawing hunger, and violent war. Yet I also know this isn’t a suffering Olympics. There are no medals for the most-wounded winners. Comparisons are counterproductive. I’m simply hoping to carry my own cross well, seeking to live a life imbued with grace.

And so, my question resurfaces. Where is God in the burrows of the gruesome, ugly tarantula hawk wasps? Where is God in chronic illness? Where is grace in the painful, distressing, soul-wrenching dark nights?

One of the unique challenges of chronic illness is its ambiguity. Most days, a person lives in a confusing no-man’s-land between health and sickness. It’s often a blurry place of not-quite-sick and not-quite-well.

I may show up to an evening event looking seemingly fine, but I’m able to be there because I have carefully and intentionally rationed my energy during the day. My cross is invisible. I almost never use a wheelchair; I don’t limp or carry a visible marker like an oxygen mask or feeding tube. But I also don’t run or even stand for long, nor do I spend long days meandering through shopping malls or amusement parks.

I’m careful—measured. Even my movements are rationed. There’s a kind of carefree recklessness even in something as benign as conversation—a gesticulation of the arms, large inflections of the voice, an unpredictable expressiveness of the face. But I’ve found that even my conversation reflects this careful conservation. I stay closer to my body. The words are rationed and the movements smaller, slower, and more intentional.

The therapist and multiple-sclerosis sufferer Robert Shuman observed of his progressing illness that “once-simple choices about trips to the city or walks downtown become intensive, hypervigilant, body-scanning, problem-solving matters.” I can relate. Is there a place to sit down? Can I politely excuse myself from a conversation without it being socially awkward? What is my body needing right now—have I demanded too much of it, stretched it too far? Is my body so bossy that it will prevent me from being sufficiently focused on the social task at hand? What will this cost me later today? Tomorrow?

A few years ago, I was at a low point. Daily I felt drained from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. Even showering felt like a monumental task—so big. So heavy. One day I switched a load of laundry in the basement and then lay down on the floor because it was too much effort to walk the half flight of stairs to the family room. Sitting upright at the table for a meal was sometimes too much. There was no relief in sight, and I had no idea how I could be a mother and wife, let alone a fulfilled human being in this body that was absolutely void of vitality. I had nothing.

My sense of spiritual connection was also at an all-time low. The gospel message was “turn to Jesus. He will not forsake you.” But the invitation seemed suddenly inane, nonsensical. I felt forsaken. Utterly abandoned and forgotten by God. The chasm between what God offered and what I believed Him to be capable of offering was entirely too wide, and I found myself stranded in the gap. My arms stretched wide between two truths—the attentive God I trusted, and the absent God I experienced.

There in the dry, parched no-man’s-land was my wrestle. I was Jacob, wrestling with the messenger and crying, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Gen. 32:26). I was Sarah, abandoned between promises of a numberless posterity and the reality of an empty womb (Gen. 17:16).

And time stretched on. So much time.

In hunger, I turned anew to all the things that were supposed to help me discover Jesus. My scripture study was not orderly or methodical. I clung to the words of Isaiah, which became almost a mantra for me:

For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. (Isa. 54:7–8)

I read the promises over and over, though deep down I wondered if the words were just pretty poetry and nothing more.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour. (Isa. 43:2–3)

My prayers were urgent, though they were largely without words. I stumbled along, doing what I could to care for myself and my family, but feeling very much a forsaken failure. My attentive husband literally carried me when I needed it and, along with family and friends, sat with me, cleaned our house, brought me dinner, and pointed me to hope. I listened to Christian hymns on repeat:

“When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul!”

I practiced daily for grace. Absent experiences of grace, I clung to practices out of desperation.

“Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me, save that thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, thy presence, my light.”

One day—I can point to the exact place I stood in my bedroom, next to my Great-Grandma Esther’s hand-me-down jewelry box—I was pondering some scriptural examples of unflinching faith, including the biblical Esther, who declared, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). There were also Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who knew that God had the ability to deliver them from the fiery furnace, but also knew that if He didn’t, they would remain faithful (Dan. 3:17–18); and Mary, who with absolute submission said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).

And I asked myself, if I got to the point where I simply could not find the divine communion and spiritual healing I sought, what would I do? Would I give up on the Lord? Would I turn elsewhere?

Almost as I thought this, in a holy, perhaps mystical experience which I can only call gracing, I knew that I would never turn my back on the Lord. It was simultaneously a decision, a feeling, a direction, and a command. It was also a scripture and a hymn:

Even if I live my whole life and never find the peace I seek, I will not give up on the Lord. I will wait upon Him however long it takes.

On the surface, these words barely touch the significance of the experience for me; I admit they seem wholly unextraordinary. But the experience itself was fire. It was unclear what part of this lightning bolt stemmed from me and what part from God. In some ways, its intensity convinced me that it could not have emerged from my weak self, which was entirely too fickle and frail for such bold declarations. But in another sense, this conviction seemed to stem from the most authentic part of myself—the spiritual core that knew God intimately, even through veiled vision.

But also, in a strange inexplicable way, the demarcation between me and God seemed irrelevant. In communion with God, we were one and the same—indistinguishable. It was a duet, a dance, a covenant: a gift given and a gift received, a promise made and a promise trusted. It wasn’t submission; it was collaboration and union.

After the long wrestle, like Jacob, I had prevailed (Gen. 32:28). Like Sarah, I laughed (Gen. 18:12). I had been given power from God and all was new.

Isaiah had promised that the rivers would not overflow me (Isa. 43:2), and this moment felt like a gasp for air after having been held underwater for too long. It was an awareness of the feathers being lifted ever so slightly—pointing me towards the enveloping air that was present the whole time, embracing me in grace.1

Over the next few months, my physical health improved and became more manageable. Though it continues to challenge me, and I still have bad days and months, the spiritual epiphany continues to center me when I feel the waters gathering blackness. When I pass through the waters, I remember: the Lord will be with me. And when I flounder in the gap between my hope and my experience, where it’s too dark to see, I wrestle.

There’s a critique of simplistic religious thinking called “The God of the Gaps.” Miracles, so the argument goes, are no longer miracles once we recognize they were accomplished by predictable scientific means—once the unknown becomes known. Was God’s creation of the universe a miracle? No, it was the Big Bang. Are answers to prayer miraculous? No, they were coincidence, or medical intervention. That’s all.

As our scientific understanding increases, the curtain gradually parts and the mysterious gap where God exists becomes increasingly smaller. And eventually, once we learn it all, He’ll extinguish all together.

No mystery, no God.

But my experience has laid bare a different “God of the Gaps”—not one who exists in the mysterious gaps between knowns, but in the gaps between seemingly contradictory and incompatible truths: God is attentive and worthy of my trust, and God is nowhere to be found. I see this God in the paradoxes, the space where the wrestle occurs. As the thoughtful Latter-day Saint thinker Francine Bennion noted,2 opposing scripture illuminates some of these gaps:

“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom.” (Prov. 3:13)
“In much wisdom is much grief.” (Eccles. 1:18)

“I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” (Heb. 13:5)
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1)

“Men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Ne. 2:25)
“Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7)

There are no easy answers. The ending of this chapter, in fact, sat unwritten for months. Everything is unsatisfactory. Like an open wound, the gap between the split edges pulses in pain. And though the particulars of each story differ from person to person, we all carry wounds.

In pondering the problem of theodicy, the only place I can go that makes a modicum of sense is that God promises to find us in the gap, to suffer there with us and shepherd us through the muck to make some kind of redemption possible. I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to the question of where God is in the muck of life or in the tarantula hawk wasp nests.

When I’m sitting in the dark, the promises make no sense.

But if I instead ask, “What is God doing with me in the muck?,” I might have somewhere to go. It helps me to think of God in terms of relationship rather than as a separate entity, a response rather than an existence, a verb rather than a noun. “Christ’s atonement,” writes Francine Bennion,

makes it possible for us to go through the meeting of reality, the falling, the hungering, the screaming, the crawling on the floor, the being disfigured and scarred for life psychologically or physically, and still survive and transcend it.3

For my part, chronic illness has been a significant catalyst in my search for God. I found myself stuck in the gap between daily weariness and contradictory promises that those who wait upon the Lord shall “mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isa. 40:31).

There’s an unexpected “collateral beauty” in chronic illness. Psychologist Robert Shuman writes that we might “imagine illness as a text, a medium, a way. It is material with which one can work rather than simply an unwanted force to which one is subject. . . . Like the grit in the oyster, the matter of illness becomes the substance of art.”

The medium with which those who suffer with chronic illness must build our lives is not the same as that given to the energetic, hospitable Marthas of the world (Luke 10:40–42). But it’s a different specialty, a different cell, a different clay, and the result can also be beautiful in the body of Christ. It’s the articulate young woman with Down syndrome advocating for special needs rights. It’s my grandma with trembling hands, who for years sent shaky, personal birthday cards to each of her descendants. It’s my father-in-law, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who would chat with the cashier at the grocery store about the loveliness of the day.

My own illness slows me down, challenging me to pay more attention to the life that speeds by. It turns me toward wonderful books and ideas and conversations, and it invites me to cherish important relationships and not spend too much time nursing my hurts. It teaches me to be patient with others who also have some thorn in the flesh, some challenge with which they wrestle. Chronic illness teaches me about wrestling. And it reveals grace.

Granted, some days I forget all this; there’s just fog and weight. At those times I’m drowning in the muck, and the abstract ideal loses footing in the face of the particular reality.

But the same godly tumbling of time and space that brought hawk wasps also brought penguins and wild horses. In the wrestle, new life emerges from death: pain brings perspective and empathy, oranges grow from baked earth, crocuses emerge from ice-encrusted snow, and a phoenix rises from the ashes.

Wounds birth scars.

And I take a breath.

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This essay is an excerpt from Gracing (Faith Matters, 2024) by Hannah Packard Crowther.

Hannah Packard Crowther has an MS degree in biological science education from Brigham Young University and a twenty-plus year vocation as a full-time mom. She aspires to become a theologian, a poet, or a beachcomber. Maybe all three.

Art by J. Kirk Richards.

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Consider the lilies how they grow: 
they toil not, they spin not; 
and yet I say unto you, 
that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these (Luke 12:27).

We and God are embedded in a universe growing in complexity and beauty. God values this beauty and complexity, because it is the source of growth and diversity in the universe. We see this in the very nature of the Earth. The aesthetics of life exceed what is necessary for survival.

Life is resplendent. While in nature, we often stand in awe and wonder at the glories that life presents to us. We are convinced that God is constantly fostering beauty in life. This is important because it implies a natural aesthetic that is also a divine aesthetic. While there are scriptural examples that describe God as beautiful,1 in this essay, we view the natural world as an indication and as an expression of one of God’s deepest values. The scripture argument that “all things denote there is a God”  is often a shallow attempt to simply transfer feelings of awe and appreciation from nature to God. Here we want to take natural theology further. We argue that the existence of beauty as a tool, attribute, and aspect of nature implies that beauty is a source God aims for, uses, and values. Given that the world has evolved to our present state, here we examine the beauty in the natural world that significantly exceeds the requirements of standard accounts of survival or selection. The excess of beauty in the universe implies that God values aesthetics and beauty.

Why look to the natural world for our theological ideas? Almost from the foundations of Christianity, wasn’t the study of nature part of early attempts to explain attributes of God? Wasn’t this considered a form of theology? Even the Savior asked us to “consider the lilies of the field.” The first attempts—such as those of the composer, writer, artist, and Benedictine abbess, St. Hildegard von Bingen (1098 CE to 1179 CE)—focused on how plants and animals were created by God for human use, including food, medicine, and inspiration. The uses of plants and animals were guided by obvious signs reflected in the attributes of the organisms themselves, as with a violet (Viola odorata) that resembles a heart, which Hildegard thought calmed the heart and relieved melancholy. By the time of St. Aquinas, roughly two hundred years later (1225 to 1274), the natural world was discussed as reflecting evidence for the existence of the divine.

Arguments from natural theology formed the basis of evidence for God through much of the period from Plato to Darwin. This is famously illustrated by the watchmaker analogy introduced by William Paley in his book Natural Theology (1802). Imagine that you are on the beach and find a watch. You assume that the watch was made by a human because it is such a complex object, clearly made for a purpose: telling time. Paley extends this metaphor to nature. Since nature is so complex, it must have a designer. Alma makes a similar argument in the Book of Mormon, when he points to the natural world as evidence of God’s existence: “Will ye say, Show unto me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also all the holy prophets? The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (Alma 30:44). Similar to Paley, Alma argues that the complexity and organization of nature require the existence of God. Paley’s work inspired natural scientists (who were often clergymen) to study nature and publish their findings in natural history journals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after Darwin problematized a simplistic reading of God’s hand in creation by providing a natural mechanism for novelty in the universe, a straightforward reading from natural theology opened more questions than it answered.

Charles Darwin initially saw himself as one of these natural scientists. As a student, he was impressed by the clarity of Paley’s argument. However, Darwin eventually rejected the clergyman’s explanation after he developed his own theory about how life gradually changes through natural mechanisms of selection, trait inheritance passed down from parents, and mutation to maintain heritable variation:

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

Darwin’s discoveries about how organisms change to become more adapted to their local environment over time showed how nature itself, without intervention from non-natural sources, could change organisms through natural selection, and could produce designs more complex than any human artisan could achieve. This idea changed the world, and today we know that the processes of natural selection and evolution can create complex life without a sentient designer driving the process. While evolution does not rule out the existence of God, it does provide an explanation for life without supernatural intervention. Some of Darwin’s followers used this to draw hard lines between religion and science. Darwin, however, did not see a contradiction. At the beginning of On the Origin of Species, Darwin quoted Francis Bacon in an epigraph, which encouraged intellectual humility. The quote emphasized how no one “can search too far or be too well studied in . . . the book of God's works.” “God’s works” includes the natural world that uses evolution to change organisms over time.

Let’s look at natural theology in a new way. What if we revisited the idea of a natural theology that paid close attention to nature not only as a form of religious belief but as a way to understand attributes of the divine—but with an updated understanding of our place in nature? Specifically, are there things to be learned about God through the science of evolution and beyond? We have to be careful because part of the dismissal of natural theology is embedded in some troubling conundrums. For example, if the beauty and complexity of life attest that there is a god, what does the ugliness and stupidity of life attest to? The process of evolution can be seen as massively cruel and horrific. It does not optimize, it is blind to suffering, and does not seem to steer away from indescribable pain. This poem by one of us (Rachel) captures this nicely:

All Things

All things denote there is a God (Alma 30:44).

The slow suffering of my serviceberry bush covered in aphids,
Cornfield ant slavery to a citron ant queen,
The habitual gang rape perpetuated by mallards,
dolphins humping everything.
A stressed hamster eating her own pups.
Forests of hardwood chestnuts, lost to blight.
Children who cannot swallow and must be fed through a tube.
Maggots in the flesh of an organism still living.
Featherless, newborn bird. A crow's breakfast. God.

When we identify processes and patterns in nature, what do they tell us about creation and God’s commitments? Does God love beauty more than he wants to prevent suffering?

Rachel’s daughter has a rare duplication of some chromosomes, which has caused her to have disabilities that make it difficult for her to walk or talk. Many other children have maladaptive genetic mutations. Their suffering seems like a cruelty imposed on them by God, who chose to use natural selection to change organisms. Why does God cause pain and suffering by using a system that relies on genetic variation, which enables maladaptive mutations? Why use evolution to create life? God clearly values a certain amount of randomness and novelty, at the risk of creating forms of life that are tragically imperfect. Some organisms are unable to reproduce; some organisms do not survive. This process is bloody, cruel, and in many cases, horrific. Suffering is part of life—and even God is subject to it.  

This is something we have to keep in mind—God suffers. There seems no escape from this. Eugene England noted that where Christ recounts his suffering in Doctrine and Covenants 19, he breaks off the sentence as if the trauma is too much to describe in detail. The heavens weep. Suffering seems to be one of the elements of existence, even divine existence. But so is joy. Recall Lehi’s words, “For it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Ne. 2:11). Let’s acknowledge that one thing that evolution is very good at, besides creating suffering, is creating beauty. 

How does evolution create beauty? How can a blind, undirected process turn the stuff of mutation, inheritance, and natural selection into beauty? Because beauty is involved in so much of Earth’s life. The beautiful song and color of birds, the glorious patterns and hues of reef fish, butterflies flitting through the air, the taste of honey, the flowers of apricots, and the varieties of all the flowering plants. Truly, the world is glorious and beautiful. But in all the evidence of the beauty of creation, there are hard details of a deep-seated bleakness. Even so, it is enlightening to look at the details to see how intricate and involved this process is.

For example, a peacock’s tail illustrates the way that beauty functions as communication among agents in nature. Peacocks compete with the display of their tails to attract a mate. While the peacock’s tail is encumbering, it’s still possible to survive with it. There is currently debate about whether or not sexual selection can be independent of natural selection. Many scientists see sexual selection as a subset of natural selection, arguing that the traits that animals see as sexually attractive are nothing but an honest signal of that organism’s health and fitness. However, evidence is accumulating that sometimes they are not. In The Evolution of Beauty, ornithologist Richard Prum argues that beauty is not about fitness but is “the result of a coevolutionary dance between desire and display.” In this discussion of sexual selection, it’s important to note that the factors that lead organisms to reproduce are varied and complex. Female aesthetic preference can overlap with the results of male competition, adaptive traits, simple sensory preferences for the novel or the known, or other factors.

This tempts some reductionist thinkers to claim that this is all that beauty is—matter in motion with no other purpose than to allow organisms to find mates. However, as Katya Mandoki argues in The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic, beauty runs deeper than its utilitarian use. She maintains that the aesthetic exceeds what is necessary for evolutionary needs. This is why we and birds can agree on the beauty of birdsong and why we and bees can agree that flowers are beautiful—although our attention to this beauty may serve different purposes in different species’ needs. This does not exclude use by organisms for purposes of survival, but it does show that the beauty that they use is a part of the universe as well. This is also visible when evolution with complex factors emerges, as is found in plant life. Both of these factors, real beauty and evolutionary need, are in play; they are both drawing on universal realities. 

Evolutionary science reduces the beauty we see in nature as merely determined by mate choice and sexual selection. Beauty is a way to attract a mate. But beauty in the universe exceeds that required by evolution. One example of beauty transcending self-serving utilitarian purposes is that humans find flowers beautiful. David Deutsch found that flowers are universally beautiful to humans, even though they coevolved to attract insects. Flowers, unlike leaves or waterfalls, are designed to be attractive. Their universal attraction suggests that they are using a universal language—that of beauty. Beauty and aesthetic values are a deep part of the universe. They are not just a matter of taste or cultural consensus but a part of the attributes of much of creation. The way that trait selection can change evolving bodies over time implies that there are processes that seem to be built into the universe to increase beauty. Like birds, humans feel attracted to traits that may or may not be adaptive. Does a beautiful singing voice, dimples, or a killer sense of fashion help a person survive? Most of the time, no (although professional singers and wardrobe managers exist). Beauty can transcend fitness.

Aesthetics seems to be part of the design of the universe. Perception of beauty in nature is not human-centric. It is an expression of how multiple systems work together. God created a system that allows us to see beauty all around us in the natural world, so we argue he must value it and the ecosystems that allow its creation. God’s craving for beauty is one attribute of the divine.

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Rachel Meibos Helps (@helpsful.reviews) and Steven L. Peck (@sciencehoroscope) are BYU hedge theologians who are fascinated by the intersection of theology and science. Their fiction imagines alternate universes, while their nonfiction thoughtfully combines curiosity and relevance to this world.

Art by Marianne North (1830-1890).

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Supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Wayfare Magazine announces a call for essays and creative works exploring the themes of latter-day science and restorative modernity. We anticipate that the resulting Latter-day Science forums will support a 2027 special issue of Wayfare Magazine, published in both print and digital formats, alongside separately solicited essays, reprints of classic essays, and other creative works (art, hymns, fiction, poetry, etc.).

The forum co-editors, neuroscientist Madeline Peterson, media scholar Benjamin Peters, and intellectual historian James Ungureanu, invite you to explore the dynamic relationship between science, religion, and modernity through a Latter-day Saint lens. We seek nonfiction and fictional stories—narratives previously untold or overlooked—that the LDS tradition can reclaim and contribute to modern knowledge, enriching our collective understanding of a material, evolving, emergent cosmos and humanity's entangled place within it.

The LDS tradition, with its emphasis on continuous revelation and the pursuit of truth, offers a unique vantage point for considering the interplay between the earthly and the divine. What do the last two hundred years of science, religion, and modernity have to offer one another? How might the theo-scientific resources emerging from the entanglement of the Latter-day Saint tradition and modern science since the 1820s help address fundamental questions? What other pressing questions might need addressing? (Find a list of over 500 keywords to spark thought at the bottom of this post.)

EDITORIAL GUIDELINES

While the forum coeditors welcome all inquiries and conceive of science in the broadest sense of the German Wissenschaften (including the humanities, social sciences, and the professions), we are not seeking Sunday School solutions or autodidactic pet theories. (For example, a successful take on Kolob should primarily rethink this world before any other.) We aim to advance thoughtful narratives, close readings, novel theorizations, renewed inquiries, and other creative works that broaden understanding of the human condition in a working cosmos.

KEY QUESTIONS FOR EXPLORATION

The coeditors welcome contributions exploring a range of topics, including but not limited to:

• Core questions such as, How does heaven know earth? How does earth know heaven? (How might older senses of knowing reshape parental visions of heaven and earth?) What is Latter-day Saint science, what is latter-day science, and how would one know? What are the necessary, sufficient, or graceful relationships between modern science and latter-day religion?

• Latter-day learning: How might LDS theological practice and understanding, rooted in Joseph Smith's vision of a progressing divine partnership, illuminate the broader dialogue between science and religion in human understanding? What philosophical, methodological, and storytelling stakes arise in conceiving of a common progressing, embodied, and pluralist universe? Is there something, say, curiously pre-postmodern about both empiricist science and materialist LDS theology?

• Stories in the 5Es frames: What stories about what this forum is calling the five Es—emergence, evolution, embodiment, entanglement, and entropy—would help clarify a latter-day relationship between revelation and knowledge? What, if anything, can, or must be, seen from within these traditions? What, if anything, can, or must be, seen from without?

THE FIVE Es FRAMEWORK

• What is at stake in entropy, emergence, embodiment, evolution, and entanglement in the latter days? How might our forum’s cosmological 5Es interact with the cognitive 4Es (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended)?

• How does this framework relate to systems thinking, environmental action, transhistorical and transhumanist possibilities?

• How do latter-day developments in any number of contemporary fields—anthropocosmology, bioastrology, complexity studies, divinity, evolution, fantasy and (science) fiction (just to start the alphabet)—interact with the 5E framework or otherwise reveal truths about the present world order? How do developments in genome, gravity, the internet, modern medicine, multiverse theory, nuclear energy, ocean and space exploration, string theory, or other areas inform that view?

• How do questions about faith-lit science illuminate developments in technology, media, storytelling, the environment, and current uneven relations of information, knowledge, and power?

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND COMPLEXITY

• How do these relationships balance the complexity of the cosmos with the parsimony of understanding?

• How do reductionism and complexity reconcile, if at all? When do theory, revelation, and evidence sit in useful tension with one another?

• How might various sources of truth—discernment, experiment, (science) fiction, theory, tradition, scripture, and others—inform a faithful worldview that remains underdetermined by evidence?

• Under what conditions do collective epistemic humility and fearless inquiry grow together?

SCHOLARLY METHODS AND SPIRITUAL TRUTH-SEEKING

• What are the methods, philosophies, and underlying theologies behind religious and scientific truth-seeking?

• How might critical reflection, hypothesis testing, and inspired reading serve as different names for the toolkit used to construct and reclaim truth in Zion?

• How might spiritual "blinding"—the introduction of deliberate unknowns and experimental discipline—serve a culture rich with epistemic uncertainties?

• Whence the religious energies in worldbuilding, science fiction, and fantasy?

• How might latter-day scholarship serve as worship and calculated kingdom-building?

• How might latter-day worship invite the awe, discipline, meaning-making, reverence, and speculation that informs scholarly inquiry?

HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY THINKERS

How might insights from thinkers such as Thomas Bayes (pastor of probability), Emanuel Swedenborg (anatomy and natural philosophy), Joseph Smith (School of Prophets), Susa Young Gates (women’s rights), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit paleontologist), B. H. Roberts (progressive education), John A. Widtsoe (rational theology), Martha Hughes Cannon (public health), Lillian Moller Gilbreth (organizational psychology), Henry Eyring (chemistry), Karl Popper (falsifiability), Hannah Arendt (public), Thomas Kuhn (paradigm shift), Mary Hesse (analogy), Rosemary Radford Ruether (ecotheology), Paul Feyerabend (skepticism), E. Robert Paul (LDS cosmology), Bruno Latour (catholic epistemologies), Brandon Sanderson (worldbuilding and context), among many others, prove relevant today?

TIMELINE AND SUBMISSION PROCESS

We invite scholars, artists, and thinkers to contribute to this vital conversation at the intersection of faith, science, and human understanding. Contributions may be in any genre of creative work, although story-driven nonfiction essays of 1,000-2,000 words are especially welcomed. Longer pieces may also be solicited in conversation with the forum co-editors.

Click below to submit an essay and select the category “Latter-day Science Forum.”

Deadline for submissions is November 1, 2025. For questions, write us at wayfareeditor@gmail.com.

A New Story Of Creation: A Latter-day Science Wayfare Forum Keywords

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