THE POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTION OF AWE AND NATURE APPRECIATION TO POSITIVE MORAL VALUES

Abstract

AbstractThe present analysis utilizes publicly available survey data to assess attitudes consistent with the religious naturalist orientation. Religious naturalism entails a sense of awe and reverence toward the natural world, and the survey data have subscales assessing awe and a question regarding opportunities to appreciate nature. The reported measures of awe toward the world and secondary analyses looking specifically at nature appreciation found, independent of theistic belief, significant statistical relationships between awe, nature, and self‐reported sense of deep appreciation and peace, the likelihood to care about others, and an association with joy and compassion. These results imply that awe and reverence toward the natural world are independently associated with common moral values (e.g., compassion). This exploratory analysis demonstrates that, from a pragmatic and moral values perspective, religious naturalism has the potential to replace traditional theistic orientations, and that the simple rejection of religious discourse should be reconsidered. Further research should attempt to verify these preliminary conclusions.