Science, Humanism, and Religion: The Quest for Orientation (Studies in Humanism and Atheism)

In the human quest for orientation vis-à-vis personal life and comprehensive reality the worldviews of religionists and humanists offer different answers and science also plays a crucial role. Yet it is the ordinary embodied experience of meaningful engagement with reality in which all these cultural activities are rooted.Human beings have to relate themselves to the entirety of their lives to achieve orientation. This relation involves a non-methodical meaningful experience that exhibits the crucial features for understanding worldviews: it comprises cognition volition and emotion is em bodied action-oriented and expressive. From this starting-point religious and secular worldviews articulate what is experienced as ultimately meaningful. Yet the plurality and one-sidedness of these life stances necessitates critical engagement for which philosophy provides indispensable means. In the end some worldviews can be ruled out but we are still left with aplurality of genuine options for orientation.