Yep- there is a reason there are so many Mormon sci-fi authors and why Mormons are one of the few religions where engagement increases with education. Growing

Yep- there is a reason there are so many Mormon sci-fi authors and why Mormons are one of the few religions where engagement increases with education. Growing up LDS there was never any existential angst as I became more educated and there was never a need to overcome any cognitive dissonance as I learned evolution or cosmology- the baseline belief is a very sci-fi one of the first super-consciousness (God) taking upon itself the shaping of spiritual (dark matter?) and then physical matter and making pathways for other intelligences to master the same. No ex-nihilo involved. Even if the LDS specific conceptions have all the details wrong, the overarching idea is completely plausible.