ABSTRACT

A meaningful life, it was argued at the end of Chapter One, must involve worthwhile activities or projects that enable us to flourish as human beings. Such flourishing requires the development of our human capacities for feeling and reason: it involves cultivating the faculties that allow sympathetic emotional interaction and open rational dialogue with our fellow humans. This high-minded ideal in turn led us into questions about the relationship between our moral endeavours and the nature of the cosmos we inhabit: can the modern scientific view of the universe leave any room for the hope that ultimate reality is somehow supportive of our struggle for meaning and goodness? The conclusion reached at the end of Chapter Two was that while there is no satisfactory inference from the nature of the world as we find it to the existence of a supreme underlying principle of meaning and goodness, nevertheless the character of the world as we find

it cannot be said to rule out such an interpretation of its underlying nature.