In The Soul of the World renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the
sacred against todays fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships
moral intuitions and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be
understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive - and to understand what we are
- is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of
God or a defense of the truth of religion the book is an extended reflection on why a sense
of the sacred is essential to human life - and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In
short the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our
aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are? Drawing on art
architecture music and literature Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human
experience and expression tell the story of our religious need and of our quest for the being
who might answer it and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul.
