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Toward a “Post-Materialist Science”?

Toward a “Post-Materialist Science”?

Last updated on: September 23, 2026 at 4:36 pm by Dan Peterson

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Toward a “Post-Materialist Science”? 2026-09-23T16:36:36-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Sidney Rigdon (played by Joe Carlson) makes his case to the assembled Saints at Nauvoo in a scene from the 2024 Interpreter Foundation film Six Days in August.

Have you watched “‘Why Not Sidney Rigdon’ — Episode 35” yet? Hmmm? Inquiring minds want to know! It’s the most recent installment of the Interpreter Foundation’s Becoming Brigham project.

And this article went up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Reprint: The Book of Moses as a Pre-Augustinian Text: A New Look at the Pelagian Crisis,” written by Terryl L. Givens:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses — Inspired Origins, Temple Contexts, and Literary Qualities Volumes I and II, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David R. Seely, John W. Welch, and Scott Gordon. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-threads-in-the-book-of-moses/.

“Coming from a tradition that has labored under the pejorative label of heretics for almost two centuries, Latter-day Saints should be especially attuned to the historical formation of such categories and to revolutions in recent scholarship over the meaning and validity of such labels as they are deployed in Christian historiography. I want to situate the Book of Moses in the midst of such developments, since they give us powerful new grounds for seeing the text as both authentically Christian in its themes and pre-Augustinian in its doctrine.”

On the campus of Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Much, though not all, is well in Zion: “Understanding Latter-day Saint Membership Demographics: Shifts in Latter-day Saint numbers in the U.S. align with scriptural prophecies and underscore the importance of spiritual depth over mere numerical strength.” And see this, too, from the Church itself: “Measuring What Matters: The People Behind the Numbers”

This is also worth reading (although I should warn you in advance that you shouldn’t be disappointed if the state in question turns out not actually to be Utah): “The Curious Case Of America’s Most Atheist State.”

In the meanwhile, Jonathan Rauch, a gay Jewish atheist, weighs in on the speech given recently in Washington DC by President Dallin H. Oaks: “Perspective: When religion meets constitutional democracy: From the National Cathedral, President Dallin H. Oaks emphasized negotiation and coalition-building over culture war confrontation”

The plaques for Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin in the North Choir aisle of Westminster Abbey (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph

I’ve finally finished reading Michael A. Flannery, Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2018).

Flannery believes that “One of Wallace’s significant kindred spirits is Anthony O’Hear, professor of philosophy at the University of Buckingham and honorary director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy” (144). On page 145, he cites O’Hear as observing that

from a Darwinian perspective, truth, goodness, and beauty and our care for them are very hard to explain. But they exist, at least in the sense that they condition and direct much of our behavior.” (145)

Flannery also notes

the sanguine expectations during the 1990s among geneticists and neuroscientists that between mapping the genetic code and the proliferation of sophisticated technological devices such as the computed axial tomography (CAT) scan and the positron-emission tomography (PET) scan that the problem of intractable disease and even the mystery of the human mind might be definitively solved. . . .

Those high hopes were soon brought down to earth. Suggestions that chimps share 98 percent of their DNA with humans — even without quibbling over how researchers arrived at that number — only raised greater questions about how such vast differences in cognitive abilities could be explained by a mere 2 percent. In fact, this 2 percent difference not only gives instructions for a 300 percent bigger brain but a vastly more versatile and competent mind. (146)

Probably paraphrasing “another kindred spirit” of Alfred Russel Wallace — the “physician, commentator, and historian of medicine and science James Le Fanu” (145) — Flannery remarks that

Knowing every cell and synapse will tell us no more, for example, about the brain than studying the paper, ink, and. font composition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will tell us about life, morals, marriage, and society among the early nineteenth-century English gentry. (147)

“In the end,” he writes, referring to Sir John Eccles, the Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapses of the human brain,

C. U. M. “Chris” Smith’s assessment of “Darwin’s Unsolved Problem” is that it remains unsolved. He even goes so far as to say, “we may be closer to an understanding of how the living world originated on the surface of this planet . . . but of how it [the human brain[ includes quail, that is phenomenal or sensory consciousness, we are no nearer understanding than Darwin was a century and a half ago.” The point is Wallace’s enigma remains, and attempts to answer it by Darwinian mechanisms seem little more than another reversion to the “promissory materialism” Eccles complained of more than a quarter century ago. (149, italics in the original)

One final quotation for now, referring to a manifesto calling for a Post-Materialist Science (PMS):

A summary of its principal tenets relevant to Wallace include a rejection of materialism and a complete rejection of its attendant reductionism, a rejection of the idea that the mind is nothing but a physical activity of our brains, mind is as important as the physical world and is, in fact, a primordial aspect of it, it openly encourages systematic investigation of psi phenomena (extrasensory perception, precognition, and psychokinesis), it also encourages controlled laboratory experiments with mediums and is interested in studying near-death experiences. PMS believes that “Mind is fundamental in the universe, i.e., it cannot be derived from matter and reduced to anything more basic.” Indeed, “scientists should not be afraid to investigate spirituality and spiritual experiences since they represent a central aspect of human existence.” (152)

To read the Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science and to examine its list of signatories (totaling, at the moment approximately 610 scientists, professors, physicians, and “thought leaders”), see here.

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