Biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake is the bestselling author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home in which he argued there was a connection between animals and humans beyond what science understood. Now, in The Science Delusion, he argues that science is being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogma. He says that science would be better off without beliefs that all reality is material or physical; that the world is a machine, made up of dead matter; that nature is purposeless; that consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain; and that free will is an illusion.

Sheldrake, a former research fellow of the Royal Society, examines this dogma from a scientific viewpoint, and says science would be freer and more fun without it.