Dworkin's last book explores "cosmic religious feeling" as an expansive sensibility much larger than mere belief in a god. Here he finds what he so often sought in his books, "common ground"—in this instance with atheists, humanists, pluralists, pragmatists… As WJ said, the deepest religious impulse is not directed towards a god. It's a yearning for more life.
"The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves as atheists have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a "personal" god, they nevertheless believe in a "force" in the universe "greater than we are." They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about vast space but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it."
— Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin (2013)
— Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin (2013)