Addison slammed her video comm screen shut. She couldn’t believe they’d gone with Coleman’s design for the keystone species on Fazeroth-7. His creation was so boring—yet another wolf analog. Even its adaptations for the planet’s excessive rainfall were uninteresting. He’d stolen the waterproofing mechanism from duck feathers and stuck it onto the animal’s fur. No elegance or imagination. Stupid Coleman and his stupid smug face.

Her pulse was pounding through her temples. Addison sighed loudly as she rested her head on her desk, trying to get a hold of herself. There was no way she could take a whole five years working on rodent species again. It had seemed like such a good idea when she’d chosen this specialty in college on Proxima Centauri-b. She’d spent four years accumulating a lot of student loan debt to go to the most elite terraforming school, the one based on the first-ever terraformed world, and this was what she got for it? Management clearly needed their heads evaluated—how could they not see that her talent was being completely wasted? Another terraforming cycle designing iterations on tiny fluffy bodies with long tails and big teeth would absolutely do her in.

“Not good news, I take it?” Mikael, her drone assistant, buzzed over to her desk, his spherical body bobbing up and down on his six propellers in a way that was entirely too perky for Addison’s mood.

Her voice was muffled by her long hair that spread around her on the desk, “They gave it to stupid Coleman and his ridiculous duck-wolves.” She knew she sounded like a petulant child, and she didn’t care.

“I was sure you had it this time. Your carnivorous giga beaver was a shoo-in for F-7’s swampy climate.” The little drone buzzed across her shoulder, his version of a hug, given that he lacked hands. The bots hadn’t been invented by humans—at least that was what they claimed. But galactic history was so long that their origin wasn’t quite clear. It was clear, however, that Mikael and his fellow bots were especially good at assisting in terraforming. Almost all of them seemed to work for one company or another. Mikael had been specially assigned to help her think through an organism’s entire genome in a way that a human brain didn’t have the working memory to handle, but he wasn’t programmed to automatically be sympathetic. The fact that he made this effort at understanding made her feel a little better. He frequently did things like this, which made it easier to remember that he was an autonomous being and not just a robot. Mikael had his own will and made his own choices. He could have chosen to work on anyone’s project; Bradley in plant engineering had been trying to entice Mik away for years. Addison secretly thought Mik kept working with her because he understood her true potential.

Addison leaned back into her desk chair. “There’s no one in this company with vision. What’s the point of being terraformers if we just keep making the same old Earth standards with slight modifications? No one’s built anything truly new in the last century and a half.” She spun her chair around to gesture at the portrait of her icon, Dr. Anna Boller. “Where are this century’s xenobots or photosynthetic arche-fish? We literally have the powers of creation, and we waste it building stupid generic mansions to spec for wealthy corporations.”

After another few minutes of ranting to Mikael, her anger had run itself out, leaving behind a sullen hopelessness. Mik turned back to setting up the frameworks for the rodent project—sigh—while she moodily poked through the messages in her inbox, opening one message after another without really doing anything. Her fake-productivity sunk to the low point of sorting through the folder where messages from recruiters were filtered to. She’d been with Fearless Interplanetary for almost 3 terraforming cycles now. Maybe it was time to move on to somewhere new, somewhere that would let her really explore what she could do.

Her attention snagged on one email with a promising subject line: “We’re Taking Creation in a Different Direction.” The message started by praising her work on Liptus-22. That was the one where she’d snuck the fluorescent rabbits past her supervisor (and been thoroughly reprimanded when it was discovered too late in the ecostabilization to be undone). Sure, it made them easier prey to the predators that had UV vision, but it also allowed the bunnies another method of communication in low-light conditions. She smiled at the memory of the faintly neon blue streaks bounding across L-22’s grassland biome. This recruiter clearly had good taste. The message continued:

We think you would be a great fit for the bioforming team on our newest project. It’s an exclusive group doing radical new things that could change the face not only of a world, but of terraforming as we know it. If you are interested in this offer, we invite you to schedule a tour of our facilities and see if your skillset and motives match with ours.

“Hey, Mik,” she called, “what do you think of this?” Even though Mikael was at the other side of the room studying their latest assignment, a small corner of his memory was always aware of her desktop display, so he would know what she was talking about without her having to explain.

He buzzed over to her desk. “Seems strange that they’re so cagey about the project. What could they possibly be doing that’s so revolutionary?”

“Ah, everyone in terraforming is cautious about their trade secrets.”

“But have you ever even heard of them? Galactic Innovators, Inc., isn’t showing up on any of my queries.”

Addison scanned the message again, but Mik was right: It listed no solid details about the company. True, head-hunters usually pushed the prestige of the company as part of the package, but was it really that unusual? “Maybe it’s a shell company. If they really are about to make a big move, it makes sense they wouldn’t want to reveal their hand.”

“Or maybe their work isn’t above board. Remember what happened to the TerraFirm team on Jackson-6?” The drone clicked disapprovingly.

“Those guys were idiots. They should have done the background research. If even one person had checked the planet’s registration, the whole bio-incompatibility disaster never would have happened.”

“I know you’d never be that careless.” Mikael bobbed in a figure eight, his gesture for equivocation. “Still, this one gives me a bad feeling.” Though drones couldn’t really have feelings, he tended to use that human expression for mysterious artifacts of the calculations that were his mental processes. Over the years, Addison had learned to rely on Mik’s hunches. They were usually right.

“Okay, fine,” she said, hitting the button to archive the message.

But she couldn’t archive it from her thoughts so easily. As she settled into the next four hours working with Mik on the outline for their new assignment, she couldn’t concentrate. By the end of the day, her brain was shot through with boredom, and all she had were months of fiddling with stupid little rodents to look forward to. The best she could hope for was to give her creation an interesting fur pattern or scale color when she was done, a constant reminder that management had given Coleman the real job which should have been hers. Her idea was better than his, and what’s more, she was better than him. She had an itch to just delete all of her files for the whole project and give a giant middle finger to the whole company as she stormed out of the building. But she was too rational to throw away her whole career. No company would hire her if she left like that.

That night, after too many drinks alone on her couch while staring bleakly into the inanity of some reality contest on the feeds, she filled out the application for the mystery company. Forget Mik and his feelings. She deserved better than what Fearless Interplanetary was offering. She hit send and drifted off to sleep, dreaming sweetly of the shocked look on her supervisor’s face when she turned in her notice.

The process for obtaining a tour and interview had gone much more rapidly than Addison had expected. Within three days, the company had sent her an encoded transport key which would take her from Fearless Interplanetary’s headquarters near the Narcissus galaxy to their local star system without revealing its location: paranoid, but within the normal range of paranoid for a terraforming company, she tried to convince herself. Addison stepped out of the transporter and into a sleek office built with glass and shiny metal on an orbiting station. The floor below her was clear, giving her a view of a planet below. A flashy move: they certainly weren’t afraid to do things their own way.

She paused for a moment, mesmerized by the gentle curve of the planet’s horizon. The land on the surface below was that particular shade of reddish gray of a rocky planet about halfway through its transition into a habitable class. The once barren iron-rich soil was almost finished absorbing the oxygen that had been created, finally allowing breathable air to begin building up. The light of the solar system’s star flashed off pools of water accumulating where the oceans were beginning to fill up as the company jumpstarted the planet’s water cycle. And at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere, she could just make out the thin frame of the man-made shell holding in the planet’s atmosphere. Judging from the state of things, they’d probably been working on this project for at least a couple of decades and were right on the verge of needing someone to begin the planning to bootstrap life from microbial to macro. Someone with her exact skills, she thought with satisfaction.

“Welcome, welcome!” A man in a nondescript suit with a smile that almost split his face in two stood up from his desk and approached her. She reached out to shake his hand, but he went with a bow instead, which she returned. After some pleasantries about the conditions at the transport hub and how the weather was where she lived, he led her over to a desk. “I’m afraid that before we can begin the tour, you’ll have to sign a rather lengthy non-disclosure agreement. Our backer is quite serious about privacy.”

Taking the tablet he pushed towards her, Addison scrolled quickly through the pages of small type. She was sure it was just like all the other NDAs she’d signed at other companies. Wait, was that section titled “Spiritual Disposition in Case of Accidental Death”? She tried to scroll back and find it, but it seemed to have disappeared in the sea of tiny print. Oh well, everyone knew NDAs were barely enforceable in most solar systems, so no reason to worry too much. She signed and dated, adding her terraforming license number at the bottom.

“Perfect, Ms. Fredrick,” said the man with the Cheshire grin. “Let’s start by showing you around the facilities.” The thin outline of a door appeared in the white wall behind him and slid open, disappearing seamlessly into the wall itself.

The man beckoned her to follow, and Addison did her best not to gawk at the museum-quality, larger-than-life displays that were clearly designed to impress. Play it cool. They were the ones who had reached out to her, not the other way around.

The white room didn’t have a glass floor like the lobby, instead opting for glass walls that gave a panoramic view of more of the planet’s surface. Dotted across the room were pedestals filled with informational displays about the various aspects of the terraforming process. Addison glimpsed holomodels of furry creatures at one display across the room, and she tried to analyze their nature so she’d be ready with clever questions when the tour came around to her specialty. Was that tail from a Sichuan jumping mouse or an Australian kultarr? And that bony structure on top of the head—it reminded her of a Parasaurolophus. Could it possibly be for echolocation? An interesting idea for a small mammal. Maybe they lived underground? Clearly, this company, whatever it was, was thinking beyond flashy fur patterns and unicorn horn nonsense. This job was looking better with each passing minute. If the benefits were halfway decent, she’d be a fool not to take it.

The man had been lecturing as they walked, but Addison only caught the last few words of his introduction. He paused, and she realized he was waiting for her response, so she went with something she thought fairly safe. “And where exactly is this planet?”

“Of course, even with the non-disclosure you signed, we can’t let you know exactly where this planet is. Our proprietor is very—”

“Private, yes, you mentioned that. Well then, what can you tell me about the project? It looks to be in the early stages of microbiome seeding. You’ve been working on it for, what, a couple of decades?”

“Oh, it’s been in the works for much longer than that. In fact, this planet is completely bespoke, the work of many lifetimes.”

A bespoke planet? Addison wasn’t familiar with the term, and her mind scrabbled for a possible interpretation. “You mean the planet itself is . . . manufactured?”

“Yes, exactly. Assembled from asteroids and other unformed matter in the area. Nothing less than complete creation from scratch, placed exactly in the ideal orbit around our star. I’m impressed that you grasped the concept. Many of our interviewees take some time to adjust to the idea, but that’s the kind of scale we work at here.”

Making a planet from scratch, well, it was unheard of. There was a reason terraformers started with a base planet, usually one with certain characteristics like a magnetic core or an atmosphere that gave you a head start on production. To actually gather matter together and begin the process of planetary formation manually—Addison had never even heard of anyone speculating about such a thing. The massive scale of the equipment needed to attempt it would put it beyond the reach of even the wealthiest megacorps or planetary empires she had worked with. She couldn’t wait to get Mikael calculating on exactly how it might be done. This company was clearly the Capability Brown of planetary construction. And she could get in on the ground floor!

Still hesitant to seem too eager, she tried to take his sales pitch down a peg. “It’s not actually from scratch though, right? You gathered the material from other places; you didn’t generate the elements from fusion yourselves?”

A frown broke through the man’s smile. If Addison had thought his face unsettling before, now he looked downright menacing. But the smile returned just as quickly, leaving only a crease across the man’s brow to hint at the fury beneath. “Of course, we do have to work with what we have. No sense in letting perfectly good matter go to waste. Now then, as you can see, at this point, we’ve got the seismic activity mostly settled to a manageable level, and water is beginning to precipitate out of the atmosphere. We have plans to begin seeding the ecosystem as soon as the weather patterns stabilize, probably in the next five years.”

The tour continued through the various displays in the room. The plant life had all been designed with maximal nutritional value as well as aesthetic beauty, yet all novel designs. Nothing looked like a direct rip-off of old Earth, which was difficult to pull off. The animals were unique as well, not just the usual remixes but several completely new concepts experimenting with different styles of symmetry and locomotion. It seemed pretty standard except for one detail that Addison couldn’t explain. The plants had been designed not to reproduce until a signal was received from the company’s base, which served as an artificial moon. It was the same with the animals. The little creatures she had observed from across the room were part of a vast web of species, but no individual could reproduce without an explicit input from the company.

“A question, Mr—” Addison realized that the man had never given her his name.

“Call me Smungblaze.” He punctuated his name with another unsettling grin. Was it her imagination, or were his teeth sharper than average? She had seen some people with those kinds of body-mods on dark corners of the net and on crime dramas, but never in real life. Maybe this whole thing had been a mistake. She wished that she had brought Mik with her. But seeing how this company was too paranoid to even tell her where they were located, she hadn’t even bothered to ask.

“Smungblaze.” Her mouth felt somehow wrong forming his name. “Doesn’t that kind of micromanagement defeat the point of terraforming? Isn’t the whole idea to bootstrap the ecosystem until it’s self-sustaining?”

“And exactly how did that work out for Earth? An out-of-control biosphere that had to regulate itself via a series of mass extinctions? And once humans got involved, evolution was far too slow to allow the pace of adaptation necessary to keep up, leading to total ecological meltdown. The terraforming innovations only barely happened in time to salvage what was left. No, no, no, with our method, we can easily adapt any organism to suit further developments through selective breeding.

“Besides, what’s the point of making a planet if you can’t get every detail perfect?” Smugblaze gestured to the displays around the room. “Nothing on this planet will happen by accident. There will be no overpopulation, no famine. All of our animals will be kept strictly under our control at all times. That way they can all live happy, fulfilling lives exactly as they were meant to.”

Somewhere in her gut, Addison felt there was something wrong with this argument, though she tried to shove it down. Terraforming projects were always somewhat ego-driven: Any corporation or group who thought they deserved their own custom planet had to have an inflated self-image. It sounded like a lot of extra work to manually control an entire planetary ecosystem, but then again, who cared if the boss was a bit over-the-top as long as the job paid well and she got to see what she could really do when given free rein on a project?

That brought another question to mind. She turned around the room, noting that most of the biological niches seemed to be filled. “It seems like the job of mapping out the ecosystems is mostly done. What project are you hiring for?”

“Oh, I’ll leave that reveal for our CEO. He’s anxious to meet you.”

The CEO was interviewing her personally? She barely had time to think over what this could mean when Smungblaze turned and glided across the floor of the display room as effortlessly as a lion stalking through the savannah. Addison almost had to jog to keep up with him as he headed down a hallway towards the large set of double doors. The large brass doors screamed executive with ornate engravings of what looked like a garden filled with old Earth standard plants and animals. Crossing the center of the doors was a large apple tree, laden with fruit. Strange for someone so forward-thinking to be so nostalgic for Earthtimes.

Smungblaze pushed open one of the doors and gestured for her to make her way inside. Addison stood to the side waiting for him to follow, but instead he gave her a little wave and one last grin and let the door swing shut behind her. She almost thought she heard a lock clicking behind her, but that must just have been her nerves causing her imagination to go into overdrive.

The room was as brightly lit as the one before it, but with a dark inlaid wood floor and red curtains surrounding the large window on one wall looking down on the partially completed planet. The room felt a little warmer than she was comfortable with, but maybe the boss was adjusted to a tropical climate.

“Come in, come in, Ms. Fredrick. I’m so delighted to meet you.” A handsome man with dark hair that looked frozen with layers of hairspray sat behind the desk which somehow projected the idea of a throne. Nothing else to do but go forward. She approached the man with what she hoped was a confident walk. Remembering Smungblaze’s greeting, she attempted a courteous bow before she sat in the chair in front of the desk.

“Ms. Fredrick, may I call you Addison?” His smile was refreshingly warm. “I’m so glad you replied to our recruitment email. I’d heard of your designs and hoped you’d reach out.”

He had heard of her designs? Well, of course he had. She did make the best rodents in the industry. It made sense that someone had finally started noticing. “Thank you, sir. It’s been so interesting to see the radical designs you’re working on here.”

“I knew you’d be interested in them, Addison. You’re someone with obvious visionary taste. I hope you’ll decide to contribute your talents to our efforts.”

Is he offering me the job already? Though she was more than ready to see the back of Fearless Interplanetary, there was something fishy about his eagerness. “And what is it you’re needing designs for?”

“Did Smungblaze not tell you? He’s always too secretive about these things.” The man fixed her with an intense gaze, and she noticed for the first time the strange amber color of his eyes. “The project I need you to design is only the crowning jewel of our whole custom world, the pinnacle of the ecosystem, the caretakers of my garden: Homo Nonculpa. Perfected man, you might say.”

Enhanced humans. Addison nearly swore under her breath. Of course, there had to be a catch. Mikael would be insufferable when he found out he’d been right. Body-mods were one thing, riding the limits between edgy and illegal, but altering human genetics had been banned hundreds of years ago. There were a few less-ethical terraforming companies who skirted the guidelines, fudging things just a bit, making the future planet’s residents slightly taller, smarter, or more beautiful, never enough for a regulator to prove anything more than lucky chance. From the whispers she’d heard at professional conferences, it took a good amount of skill to get away with. And if you were caught, the whole planet would be razed from orbit and you’d never work with anything more technologically advanced than a basic calculator again.

No wonder this whole company was so secretive. This planet must be far enough out that they were hoping to go completely unnoticed by regulators. Was that even possible? She should run far, far away from this job. Mikael would tell her to.

But to be the first person in decades to really see what could be done with human genetics—

Was she really considering this?

In her mind came Coleman’s smug face presenting his boring duck-wolves while she was stuck tinkering with rats for the next five years. She gritted her teeth and ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach. No harm in finding out what exactly he wanted. She could always say no.

“What kind of modifications did you have in mind?”

“Of course beauty and health enhancements, but those are trivial. The main thing we want is to add some extra instincts. Things that would help everyone be happier. Adding inhibitions for certain things, encouraging others.” He steepled his hands and paused meaningfully, pointing his fingers towards her. “Is that the sort of thing you could handle?”

She bit her lip. “I think so.” Behavioral encoding was much more difficult than anatomic features, but she had never backed away from a challenge. “Like what kinds of things did you have in mind?”

“Oh, you know, no lying, cheating, stealing, I’ll get you the full list.” He smiled at her with a dazzling set of white teeth. “And there’s one more thing. A back door.”

“A back door?” Her stomach started to feel a little sick. Was it getting hotter in here?

“Well, you terraformers make bacteria with a self-destruct key so you can get rid of them once they’re finished with their job, or in case they get out of hand. This would be something similar, but it would allow our engineers to . . . assist the human if something went wrong.”

Suddenly the bright white walls and red curtains felt both too sterile and too hostile. Addison tried not to stutter, tried to play it cool. “I don’t know. I might need some time to think it over.” She stood up from the desk to make an escape, but the handsome man did the same.

“You understand we’d be doing it for the benefit of the humans involved. Their lives will be perfect. No wars, no heartache, no mistakes. It would all be so much easier for them.”

He walked slowly around the desk as he talked, and Addison had the irrational sense that he was cutting her off from the exit. Ignoring how stupid she probably looked, she sprinted towards the giant copper door, but the handle wouldn’t turn. She rattled its metal frame, but it held firm. The man was still pacing after her, with the deliberation of a predator who knows its prey can go nowhere.

“Come now, you haven’t had time to consider yet.”

Abruptly the door came free and swung open. Addison lunged for the outside, only to be confronted with Smungblaze. She saw new meaning in his predatory smile as he walked toward her, herding her back into the room. “Now, Ms. Fredrick, we can’t just let you go. It was all in the documents you signed.”

“What? What are you going to—You can’t just—” Addison’s brain scrambled for purchase as she tried to stay out of reach of the two men as they slowly circled her.

“I think you’ll find we can,” said the CEO. “Now be reasonable, Addison. There’s still time to consider the possibilities of this job. We’d hate to waste someone like you.” The two men started to close in on her, and she found herself backed against the window. Were those claws sprouting from their hands?

Addison thought she heard a thud which seemed to come from behind her, though that was impossible since only the void of space lay beyond.

The windowpane exploded outward.

The sound of shattering was immediately swallowed by the rush of air exiting the room. Addison’s feet lifted off the floor as she was sucked towards the window. A sharp stab when a piece of the broken wall pierced her side as she flew past the frame and into the darkness beyond.

Her body rushed through the void, but time seemed to slow down. The partly terraformed planet stared up accusingly from below her.

She should have listened to Mik. She never should have come here.

This was it; this was how she was going to die.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a round metal body with fan blades, not whirring but motionless in the vacuum.

Mikael?

Was she hallucinating?

Her vision started to dim.

The shimmer of a force field going up. A hiss as air rushed into the pocket Mikael had created. Addison gasped for breath, but her chest screamed with pain and she was barely able to get a small gulp. She felt disconnected from her body. Something was very wrong. The strange weightless sensation of floating inside the bubble didn’t help. She looked up and saw Mikael, haloed in the light of the planet’s star. His propellers began to change, elongating slowly until they flapped elegantly, six long wings against the vacuum of space.

“Mikael! You’re beautiful!” she whispered. “I should have . . . ” A wave of thrumming pain from her side made her lose track of the thought.

“It took forever to crack the cypher on that transport token,” Mik said. “We would have been faster if you had told me where you were going, but that hardly matters now.” Beyond Mik’s head, she thought she saw dozens, no, hundreds of gracefully elongated wings. More bots flying into the wreck of the terraforming station.

No, not bots. They were—

Her mind grasped through a growing fog but couldn’t find the word.

Addison saw Mik scan her wound. But he didn’t launch into first aid mode. The implied prognosis crashed over her like a wave.

“What was—” She struggled to get the words out as things started to feel more and more unreal and disconnected.

Mik paused as if calculating, and then finally relented. “They are the reason that my kind have been assigned to supervise you humans messing around with the tools of creation. They’re always looking for a way around the natural order of things.”

“They? You knew about them? Who—”

“Rest now. You’ll understand everything soon enough.” Mik buzzed down by her shoulder, his large wings enveloping her, cradling her. Addison let Mik’s words wash over her as her mind fell into the fog. “This is my fault. I tried to guide you, but I’ve never been as good at this as some of the others. I was never able to get through your own self-absorption to help you see the larger potential of what you could do. Still, you led us to their hiding spot. We’ve been trying to locate this faction for millennia. Maybe that will help your case in the hereafter—”

With much difficulty, she turned her head towards the planet where new life was forming. Years of terraforming had numbed her to the miracle of it. She watched the drift of clouds passing across the newly created seas until they were gone.

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Liz Busby is a writer of speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and literary criticism. She is the editor of Further Light, a magazine of LDS-themed science fiction and fantasy.

Art by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895).

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In July of 2024, I was sitting in a cafe in Fes, Morocco, chatting with a Muslim acquaintance named Younes. As we discussed my ongoing research as an anthropologist of religion, Younes asked me why, after studying Islam and spending time with Muslims for so long, I had not yet converted.

I took a few moments to consider his question. It would be easy to simply say that I was a practicing Latter-day Saint, that I was deeply committed to my own faith tradition. That was true. But at the same time, through the months and years I had spent with my Muslim friends in their homes and mosques, I was developing an increasingly deep appreciation for Islam. I had come to love the embodied discipline of salat, ritual prayer. I had learned much from my friends’ discussions of akhlaq, the Islamic obligation to cultivating an ethical, virtuous character. And I had come to appreciate my friends’ deep commitments to surrendering themselves to the will of God, to saying alhamdulillah [praise be to God] no matter how difficult the circumstances. Most significantly for me, in living and worshiping alongside my Muslim friends, I had experienced moments of transcendent connection to the Divine.

With all this in my mind, I told Younes that despite my commitments to my own faith tradition, I had developed a deep appreciation for Islam’s ability to connect people, including me, to God. But I then added that I didn’t think I could know Islam was true in a way that would sincerely allow me to profess a belief in the unity of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. I told him that if I said the words of the shahadah, the Islamic profession of faith by which one enters Islam, I feared I would lack niyyah, the proper intentions that validate ritual acts, as the words wouldn’t feel true to me the way they are supposed to. I told him I was skeptical of my ability, as a mere human, to know anything was true in any kind of sure or absolute sense.

I had long considered doubts about my ability to know a major challenge in my Latter-day Saint experience. So much of what I heard in church seemed to insist that what mattered most was coming to know the truth of particular claims. I had certainly experienced what Latter-day Saints call “feeling the Spirit.” I had felt my bosom burn within me as I read scripture, as I listened to talks and testimonies, and as I sought divine comfort in moments of turmoil. But when I heard other people testify of similar experiences leading them to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of a surety, that a fairly robust list of claims was true, I often felt discouraged, deficient, and frustrated. How could anyone know that surely? My lack of commitment to knowing seemed to bother many of the Latter-day Saints with whom I had discussed it. So I figured it would bother Younes too.

But Younes’s response surprised me. He said that my incapacity to obtain a sure knowledge was not a problem because, according to his understanding, normal people do not necessarily have unbiased insight into the objective nature of reality. However, he insisted, the prophets that God had selected throughout human history could perceive and reveal God’s truth to mankind. For Younes, encountering the perfection of prophetic revelation was the means by which limited humans could come to know absolute truth.

At first, the way Younes seemed to brush off my concerns left me frustrated—yet another instance of someone insisting that objective knowledge was possible, despite my contradictory experience. But after reflection, Younes’s response led me to a realization: Many Muslims, and perhaps many Latter-day Saints too, might not have a problem accepting that most humans can’t perceive truth and reality objectively, that for most people, perception of truth is filtered through subjective human experience. But many of these same people are invested in the idea that throughout time there have been special people who have some kind of unfiltered access into the objective nature of reality, who can see and tell us what is really real and what is really true and what is really right. Thanks to Younes, I came to realize that my Muslim and Latter-day Saint friends who seemed so confident in their knowledge of the truth might not be doing so based on confidence in their own ability to know. Rather, they were likely acting based on their faith and confidence in the possibilities of revelation.

On the nature of prophetic knowledge, the fourteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun stated that “The knowledge that God gave [prophets], and the wonders he manifested through their statements, indicated that there exist things beyond the reach of man that can be learned only from God through the mediation of such individuals.”1 According to this line of thinking, prophets have the capacity to be the mediums through which divine communication is passed from God to humanity. For most of my Muslim friends, this prophetic mediation is perfect and pure. By the grace and mercy of God, it is unencumbered by the humanity of the prophet.

In contrast, Latter-day Saint teachings hold that even prophets are susceptible to the imperfections of a fallen world. Paul the Apostle troubles the surety of prophetic knowledge in this way: “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. . . . For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:8–9, 12 KJV). Through an allegory of gazing into a cloudy mirror, Paul tells us that, even in the case of prophecy, mortal perceptions of reality are always imperfect.

Despite Paul’s teaching, throughout my Latter-day Saint experience I have often heard people voice a similar view of prophetic knowledge to the one put forward by Younes and Ibn Khaldun—that prophets provide a more or less direct, perfect reflection of the mind and will of God. In Latter-day Saint circles, I’ve sometimes heard a saying which captures the essence of the friction between Latter-day Saint teachings and practices related to prophets: “Catholics teach that the pope is infallible, but nobody believes it. Mormons teach that the prophet is fallible, but nobody believes it.”2

Regardless of how closely this comes to capturing the reality of Catholic or Latter-day Saint experiences, the circulation of this story in Latter-day Saint circles points to a tension many feel between teachings that claim prophets are fallible and a religious context where openly acknowledging that prophets are sometimes wrong will, at best, turn a few heads in Sunday school. At worst, it can lead to disciplinary action. Whatever the doctrine may say, in practice, many Latter-day Saints have the habit of treating the words of the living prophets as unquestionably true.

In this vein, throughout much of my Latter-day Saint experience, as I’ve struggled through feelings of inadequacy over the things I can’t seem to bring myself to know, I’ve found myself asking: what keeps so many Latter-day Saints from taking seriously their own doctrine about the fallibility of prophets? I don’t think I have all the answers to this question, but as I’ve spoken with many friends in my religious tradition and on its peripheries, I’ve begun to see how many Latter-day Saints feel caught in a way of knowing where things are either absolutely true or absolutely false. This binary allows many to find deep meaning in the confidence that they belong to a group that possesses objective knowledge of all the answers that count. But this binary also lays the groundwork for any perceived flaw in their faith tradition to cause their personal faith to crumble. This means that people who experience doubts about one aspect of their tradition might find themselves unable to find positive meaning in any aspect of it.

As someone with a deep appreciation of the ways the Latter-day Saint tradition has allowed me to make meaning in the world, I am saddened at the idea that if anything is wrong with my religion, everything is wrong. I’m deeply sympathetic to those who feel the need to step away, but I also wish that more people could find meaning in their faith tradition even when they can’t accept every claim as objective truth. I think it’s important for Latter-day Saints to consider what opportunities such a widening of the tent might afford. What possibilities might emerge from making space for people who take prophetic fallibility seriously? What prospects for radical love and empathy might emerge from a Latter-day tradition with more diverse ways of knowing?

Reconsidering our ways of knowing is an important step in opening up space to explore these possibilities. In my experience as a practicing Latter-day Saint, I’ve been taught a fairly straightforward method for coming to know the truth. As the Book of Mormon prophet Alma writes, one should accept certain premises on faith and then experiment on the word, by which one can arrive at “a perfect knowledge” (Alma 32). The image of experimentation in the Book of Mormon and elsewhere in Latter-day Saint tradition is interesting to me because it points to ways of knowing that are remarkably similar to the ones put forward by modernist science: Both Latter-day Saints and scientific moderns are taught to come to objective knowledge through a rational process of hypothesis, experimentation, and verifiability.

But like Paul writing to the Corinthians about the fallibility of religious knowledge, the objectivity of modern scientific knowledge has also been called into question. Much of philosophy over the last century has been intimately concerned with examining the ways scientific knowledge is made, created, constructed, and otherwise subjectively produced. For example, the twentieth-century American historian Thomas Kuhn framed science as a series of shifts between different paradigms or sets of assumptions rather than a unilinear march closer and closer to ultimate truth.3 Similarly, twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed to the ways that the various power structures of a given society influence what is considered true and false such that scientific knowledge reflects social worlds as much as it reflects the natural world.4

This kind of theorizing opened scholarly discussion to the ways modern societies can sometimes fetishize scientific knowledge to the point that science becomes scientism, what the late French philosopher Bruno Latour called “the modern cult of the factish gods.”5 Latour questioned a common assumption that, while the fetishes (that is, material objects invested with mystical powers) used in religious rituals around the world are fabricated by humans, facts are not fabricated—they just “are” out there in the world. In other words, he suggested that facts are made by human hands just like ritual objects. But while most who use material items in their religious rituals openly recognize their human origins, modernist science too often ignores the mortal provenance of its similarly manufactured knowledge. Thus, Latour pointed to the ways in which a misguided, scientistic devotion to the knowability of absolute truth can actually become a problematic form of idolatry.6

The essence of both Paul and Bruno Latour’s assertions is that an over-commitment to knowledge can be problematic. The hymn “Lead, Kindly Light” makes a similar argument, namely that when we pretend to see our path laid out clearly before us, our will is ruled by pride rather than by God. This is not to say that the pursuit of truth ought to be abandoned. Rather, it is a warning against becoming so sure of what we know that we miss opportunities to experience the Divine. In Robert Harris’s novel Conclave, Cardinal Lomeli (Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, in the 2024 film adaptation) puts it this way: “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”7 There is certainly a place for making meaning as we come to know truth, but there can also be a place for making meaning as we embrace the unknown.

Returning to Paul’s cloudy mirror metaphor, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:12–13). Here, Paul shares the promise of pure, unfiltered knowledge in the world to come. But he couples that promise with an injunction for love to be our mortal-world solution to our temporary lack of objective knowledge. In the Book of Mormon’s variation on 1 Corinthians 13, the prophet Mormon stated: “Cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever” (Moroni 7:46–47). In the face of mortal limitations keeping us from pure knowledge, scripture calls on us to seek charity, the pure love of Christ. In the certainty of uncertainty, scripture calls on us to love, for “in the gift of his Son hath God prepared a more excellent way” (Ether 12:11).

But what is this more excellent way? How can we develop charity in the face of the ambiguity explored above? What might it look like to better practice the pure love of Christ? As I stated at the outset, I’m an anthropologist, and in what follows, I will discuss one aspect of anthropology called “cultural relativism” that has helped me, as a seeker of the pure love of Christ, to try to love the way Christ loves. I was initially attracted to anthropology because of the possibilities I found it afforded for living my faith, and my religious commitments have continued to inform my experience in the discipline. My hope is that my particularly Latter-day Saint approach to anthropology can be helpful to others who are similarly striving for more Christlike ways of living and loving.

Anthropologists often say they aim to understand others by “making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” In other words, they seek to understand people on their own terms, according to their own logics and experiences. Anthropologists call this effort to understand people from their own point of view “cultural relativism.” Put simply, a cultural relativist approach tries to empathize with others across differences.

The cultural relativist approach is based on the premise that people experience the world in different ways and that their particular perceptions of reality are filtered through varied assumptions and experiences. From this premise, cultural relativists hold that judging a person or group without first working to understand them is an ineffective and unethical way of encountering difference. This approach has allowed anthropologists to spend time all over the world trying to understand people’s experiences as they experience them, which in turn has allowed them to relate to others across cultural differences, including differences that some might find morally repugnant, in a more empathetic way.

Significantly, cultural relativism is very different from a much maligned “moral relativism” where nothing is real and anything goes. In recent decades, many scholars have criticized cultural relativism on the grounds that it offers too little space for critique or judgement of others’ lifeways, traditions, beliefs, and practices. Many in the academy have sought a framework that allows them to pursue a more explicit politics in which they can assert particular (often liberal secular) moral-ethical claims as broadly applicable across differences. With concerns that are remarkably similar to those of the scholars just discussed, some in the Latter-day Saint tradition have tended to interpret frameworks questioning the absolute authority and universality of their particular knowledge as a claim that there is no right or wrong.

I believe this critique is well intentioned but misguided. Cultural relativism is not moral relativism. The unilateral dismissal of all value judgements would indeed be deeply problematic for anyone working towards collective human flourishing. But in my view, cultural relativism need not prevent people from making value judgements. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine someone leading a meaningful life without operating on some sort of assumptions about what is real and what is right. Rather, I would argue that cultural relativism simply demands that before anyone asserts that their values apply to someone else, they first commit to questioning their own assumptions and to understanding the perspectives of those they might critique. This approach to cultural relativism, far from dismissing morality, becomes a moral project in its own right, a check on the human tendency to center one’s own values and assumptions to the detriment of others. Such a call for humility is part of what I understand in Jesus’s injunction to “judge not” (Matthew 7:1–5).

With this conception of cultural relativism in mind, I suggest that the subjective nature of knowledge described by Paul and Bruno Latour opens up space for us to step outside our own assumptions about what is real and what is right in order to step into the assumptions of others, to see the world from their perspective, to evaluate it based on their rationales, and by so doing, to understand, empathize, and love them. My suggestion is basically that instead of saying, “I know what is real and right and everyone else’s assumptions are wrong, or at least less true than mine,” we might consider saying, “I can suspend judgement at least long enough to empathize with a different person’s perspective.”

As I’ve studied anthropology alongside the gospel, I’ve come to realize that Jesus is the perfect example of relating to others in the empathetic way made possible by a cultural relativist approach. In Latter-day Saint teachings about atonement, Jesus Christ takes on the experiences of everyone who has ever lived, and that is why he is able to understand, comfort, and love us in a unique and perfect way. The Book of Mormon prophet Alma said that “he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind . . . that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:11–12, emphasis added). In analyzing this passage of scripture, contemporary Latter-day Saint thinker Blaire Ostler suggested that “by sharing a consciousness of every gender, race, orientation, and ability, Jesus became exceptionally aware” of the full diversity of the human experience.8

If this is the Latter-day Saint understanding of atonement and if our tradition is invested in taking upon us the name of Christ and trying to be like Jesus, trying to love as he loves, then we must follow Christ in stepping outside of our own assumptions and experiences and into the assumptions and experiences of others. In this way, I am proposing that however imperfectly we may be able to understand and empathize with others, the pure love of Christ is the solution to relating to others across differences in a mortal realm mediated by subjective knowledge. For Latter-day Saints, such an approach has the potential to fundamentally shift our discourse and practice from an emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge to an emphasis on the pursuit of charity. It is an approach in which seekers of the Divine, instead of spending their time praying to know the truth, spend time praying for the pure love of Christ. To follow this approach, we need not let go of our unique beliefs and teachings. We just need to loosen our grip on the universality of those truths enough to shift our focus toward radical forms of love and empathy.

These radical ways of knowing, being, and relating to others are not easy for me. I often get fixated on truth and right, on dividing the world up into reality and unreality, good and bad. And that very frequently gets in the way of me loving people the way Jesus loves them. Sometimes, when members of my congregation speak about all the many truths they claim to know, I find myself feeling frustrated and angry. Similarly, when Younes dismissed my concerns about the possibility of absolute knowledge on that summer day in Fes, my initial reaction was something like indignation. But as I opened myself up to curiosity and surprise, as I tried to take seriously what Younes was telling me, I ended up coming to a better understanding of his religious experience as well as my own. I was able to appreciate the meaning he found in the perfection of prophetic revelation, even if it differed from my perspective. And that in turn has helped me in church. Now, when I find myself feeling frustrated by the talks and testimonies of my spiritual siblings, I try to step outside of my own ways of knowing and appreciate the beauty and meaning they find in objective truth, especially when their perspectives don’t reflect my own. In my life as an anthropologist and as a Latter-day Saint, as I have tried to practice cultural relativism, to enact the pure love of Christ, to step out of my own assumptions about truth and right and into the assumptions of others, I have found intense spiritual meaning in the diversity of spiritual meanings. I have experienced, by the grace and mercy of God, moments of transcendent love that have connected me to the people around me, to the earth, and to the Divine in powerful, indescribable ways.

Truly, charity never faileth.

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Clayton Van Woerkom is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Michigan. His scholarship focuses on the intersections of language, religion, and migration.

Art by Henri Matisse (1869–1954).

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In my office, I have a print of a Brian Kershisnik painting entitled “Divine Intervention.” Pictured is a man struggling to write something on a piece of paper. What the man is writing is not depicted—it could be an essay, a letter, or perhaps even a math problem. Above him, several angels are rushing to his aid, but a single angel holds back the heavenly throng. Perhaps the man will be left to struggle on his own for a while. Perhaps an angel will break through just long enough to convey an inspired thought that will nudge the man just a bit further along.

Seeing this painting for the first time reminded me of an experience I had as an undergraduate mathematics student. My graduate student advisor in the research group I had recently joined gave me a small problem to tackle. We had been studying a certain class of symmetry groups defined algebraically over polynomials. My task was to investigate a proposed geometric description of these symmetry groups, which perhaps would help the research team better understand the more difficult mathematics that relied on them. I was to see if the geometric group description was isomorphic to our algebraic one—not equal, but essentially the same in all mathematical respects.

As I worked with my problem for several months, I came up with many ideas and a few partial results. My advisor suggested some possible approaches, and I spent time reading up on background theory that had some potential to help with my research. But time and time again, I had no luck.

Then one day, as I had my notes spread out on the table in front of me in the university library, I fixed on the mathematical definition of the polynomial symmetry group. I had spent many hours staring at this equation previously, but this time as I stared at my notebook a very distinct idea flashed through my mind: “Erase the A and write S instead!”

These letters represented two different matrices of numbers that I had defined previously. Substituting one for the other in my equation created a brand-new mathematical object, and at first I had no clue what to do with it. But as I continued to work on my problem in the subsequent weeks, I soon realized that this was the missing link to my puzzle—a mathematical object that bridged the gap between the algebraic and geometric symmetry group descriptions that I was trying to reconcile.

As soon as it happened, I knew that my mathematical inspiration did not originate with me. I attributed this idea to God, who took pity on my meager efforts and, perhaps through an angelic messenger, provided me with just enough information to push my project along.

Now imagine that instead of laboring intensely over my problem and praying for guidance, I had focused my efforts on crafting a carefully-worded prompt about my research question which I then fed into a large language model (LLM) AI system. Then imagine that, after a few minutes of “reasoning,” the AI system responded with the same mathematical object mentioned previously and offered me step-by-step instructions on how to use it to resolve my question. In this hypothetical scenario, I glance through the AI output, look up a few definitions, and do a few calculations. I have a solution to my problem, and though it was not one that I had come up with myself, I still bring it back to my advisor at our next meeting and we discuss next steps for our project. The mathematical progress is the same as what had actually transpired—with the benefit of being much more time-efficient. But what did I miss out on? The chance to struggle with a difficult math problem and the chance to experience God through the process.

Until very recently, this reimagining of my experience would have seemed absurd. Research-level mathematics has been out of reach of even the most powerful AI models for quite some time. In August 2025, for example, OpenAI released GPT-5 with the claims that it had “PhD level“ intelligence. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck quickly made several claims that GPT-5 was capable of generating new mathematics, but had to walk back the comments after being shown that the “new” AI results were actually plagiarized from previously published papers (see examples here and here).

However, researchers continued to develop more powerful AI models. In May 2026, OpenAI announced a startling improvement in mathematical ability in one of its latest models, and this time it had the receipts. In response to a single prompt about whether or not an open conjecture in discrete geometry was true, an AI system independently “reasoned” through the problem and found a counterexample to disprove the original statement (many mathematicians had thought the conjecture to be true). No additional guidance was given beyond the original prompt. No additional work needed to be done to complete the AI proof, though mathematicians later reviewed and refined the result.

Though this is only the first instance of an AI independently generating a novel proof, and one that primarily synthesizes ideas from disparate areas of mathematics rather than developing entirely new mathematical machinery, it raises many questions about what the future of research mathematics will look like and the role humans will play in it.1 Math focuses on discovering true statements that can be derived from sets of commonly accepted axioms using logically rigorous proofs. In many cases, math is useful for developing new technology and helping us better understand our world. However, unlike other creative fields such as art, music, and literature, there is not likely to be a strong demand for human-made mathematics as AI systems improve.

There are compelling arguments for keeping mathematics human-centered, with humans deciding which research questions to pursue, and humans having the final say on the validity of mathematical proofs. Especially with the potential growth in AI’s mathematical ability in the coming years to both generate and validate mathematical proofs, we must continue to champion human efforts to work through difficult problems so that we may better appreciate our accomplishments, wonder at the beauty of creation, and even encounter the divine along the way.

I am not alone in claiming spiritual aid to establish a mathematical result. Georg Cantor, a Russian and German mathematician famous for being the first to show that infinite sets could have varying sizes—that some infinities are “larger” than others—saw himself as a messenger sent from God to communicate new mathematical ideas and even claimed to receive divine assurances of the truth of his work.2

Similarly, in the early twentieth century, Indian-born Srinivasa Ramanujan filled his notebooks with dense equations that were sometimes difficult even for fellow mathematicians to unravel. According to some sources, Ramanujan claimed to occasionally have dreams where he would be shown new formulas; upon waking he would write them down. “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God,” he said.3 More recently even the agnostic Andrew Wiles, famous for proving Fermat’s 300-year-old “last theorem,” described the moment that he discovered the final piece that connected his proof puzzle together as a “revelation.”

But for each of these mathematicians, simply laying claim to inspiration was not sufficient to establish their results. Their work could only be accepted after being scrutinized and vetted by the broader mathematical community, which often required additional effort beyond their epiphanies.

Though Wiles might not describe his breakthrough moment as spiritual in nature, it is clear that it was only possible due to his persistence, and meaningful because of the vast amount of effort he put in to get there. Andrew Wiles spent seven years working alone on Fermat’s last theorem. After he finally presented his proof, reviewers found an irreconcilable gap in his logic. Wiles spent another year on the problem, worked with some collaborators, and finally had his moment of revelation that tied his proof back together. Initial ideas that Wiles had toyed with but set aside previously now came back to fill the gap.4

Due to his unconventional training, many of Ramanujan’s formulas were missing the accompanying proofs needed for full mathematical rigor. Proving these equations kept him and his collaborators busy during his lifetime, as well as many others long after Ramanujan had died. Some of Ramanujan’s equations, along with later work building on his results, eventually enabled Andrew Wiles to finish his own proof of Fermat’s last theorem. The divine inspiration that Ramanujan claimed only opened the door to further research, instead of settling problems once and for all.5

Cantor’s case is more complicated. For a paper early in his mathematics career, Cantor worked to determine the number of elements in two different sets: the set of algebraic numbers, and an interval on a real number line. He tried to show that the algebraic numbers were countable (able to be completely labeled by positive integers), and that the amount of numbers inside an interval on the number line was uncountable (that any labeling by positive integers would necessarily leave some numbers out). Cantor ran into some small issues though: His proof for the algebraic numbers was flawed, and his proof for the real interval was overly complicated. His collaborator, Richard Dedekind, provided a correct proof for the algebraic numbers and a simplified proof for the real interval. But instead of acknowledging Dedekind’s assistance, Cantor decided to publish these proofs under his own name and remove all traces in the proofs that would point back to Dedekind. Despite having felt called by God to champion this mathematical work, Cantor’s proofs were incomplete. Instead of continuing to work to resolve these problems, Cantor took the easy way out and claimed credit for something he did not produce.6

Interestingly, Cantor’s plagiarism did not tarnish his mathematical career. Dedekind kept silent about the slight, though he ceased corresponding with Cantor for a few years afterward. And due to pressure from Leopold Kronecker, Cantor eventually revised his uncountability proof, creating his famous diagonalization argument that is a staple in undergraduate mathematics and computer science curricula.

But for many budding scholars, taking easy-to-get answers to hard problems without putting in the effort to resolve them could stunt both academic and spiritual growth. This is especially tempting in a time of readily available AI results, which can diminish creativity and critical thinking skills.7 As Melissa Inouye puts it, “Our Heavenly Parents have given us the opportunity to struggle mightily with life’s puzzles, thereby exercising our divine capacity. We reason and rage. We stumble, and correct course. We learn to be unshaken. We learn to bend.” It is through the struggle to solve difficult problems that we learn, grow, and encounter the divine.

I firmly believe that the study of mathematics affords ample opportunity for this type of growth. I resonate with Henry Eyring, who once reminisced about his own efforts to study mathematics as an undergraduate. He candidly admitted that as a student, “I felt overwhelmed. I began to feel that I was trying to learn something that was beyond me. The more I felt overwhelmed, the less I felt the strength to keep trying.” Because of how much he struggled, he turned to God for help. He recalled that, “As I prayed, I felt the quiet assurance of the Lord. I felt Him say to my mind, ‘I am proving you, but I am also with you.’” Henry Eyring’s divine assurance came precisely because his subject was difficult to master, and because he was putting in the effort to master it.

Does working with AI necessarily mean that we are not communing with God? Must we reject technological advancement that makes research too easy, shouting with Captain Kirk, “I need my pain”? I do not think that these paths to knowledge are mutually exclusive. Latter-day Saints have had a long tradition of embracing truth from whatever source it comes.8 Mathematician Thomas Bloom also positively notes that “AI is helping us to more fully explore the cathedral of mathematics we have built over the centuries.” But as we work together with machines to develop new knowledge, we should remember to keep God in the loop not only to guide us to important insights but also to help us appreciate what it is we are accomplishing.

Ultimately, in the age of AI, the quest to develop new mathematics should be celebrated as well as the final results. In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, a character named Mr. Ramsey takes a moment to reflect on his academic achievements. Laying out his accomplishments along the alphabet as a spectrum, he notes that he had “reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.” But he agonizes over the fact that “he [was] stuck at Q. . . . He would never reach R.” Mr. Ramsey tries to comfort himself by saying that only one person in a generation would ever reach the letter Z. “Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? Provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give?”

While cold comfort for Mr. Ramsey, I believe that we must embrace our human struggle to solve problems and create new knowledge. For it is often through that very struggle that we arrive at sacred solutions and thereby encounter God.

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Nathan Cordner is an assistant professor of computer science at Utah Valley University.

Art by Brian Kershisnik (@briankershisnik).

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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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