Tag: spirituality

Morality Without Divine Command

Can someone be a good person without believing in God? It’s a familiar question, but it leaves a much deeper one unanswered: What makes something morally right or wrong in the first place? Does morality depend on divine authority, or can we find a reasonable foundation for ethical behavior without appealing to the supernatural? To explore these questions, we’ll examine Divine Command Theory, an ancient philosophical dilemma, and several approaches to secular ethics. Along the way, we’ll consider how our moral decisions affect not only the people and living things around us, but also our own sense of meaning, connection, and wonder.

What Is Divine Command Theory?

Divine Command (or Theological Voluntarism) argues that at least some of our morality depends on God’s will. In essence, what is right or wrong is connected directly to what God commands, intends, or wills.

The label of “Divine Command Theory” can be a little misleading because different versions of the assertion connect morality to different kinds of divine actions, rather than just “divine commands” alone. Philosopher Mark Murphy uses the broader term theological voluntarism, following earlier work by Philip Quinn, because these theories do not all depend specifically on divine commands¹. While I agree that’s a better label for the philosophy, I’ll continue to call it Divine Command Theory because that name is more commonly used.

Murphy distinguishes two broad approaches to theological voluntarism.

1. Normative Theological Voluntarism

This view holds that we have a fundamental moral obligation to obey God. Under this approach, specific obligations, such as not stealing, not murdering, or helping others, arise because God has commanded them. The central claim is that we ought to obey God, and that God’s commands determine our particular moral duties.

2. Metaethical Theological Voluntarism

This view asks a different question: What makes something morally obligatory in the first place? Rather than simply asserting that we must obey God, metaethical voluntarists seek to explain the nature of moral obligations by connecting them to God’s will.

For example, they might argue that if moral obligations exist, they exist because of something God commands, intends, or wills. Importantly, this position does not necessarily claim that God exists or that moral obligations actually exist. It concerns what those obligations would depend upon.

Why Do Some Philosophers Defend Divine Command Theory?

Murphy discusses three broad types of arguments offered in support of theological voluntarism.

Historical Reasons	Some philosophers argue that certain moral concepts, particularly obligation, cannot be fully understood apart from their religious origins.
Theological Reasons	Some argue that God’s sovereignty, freedom, or nature supports making moral requirements dependent on divine will.
Metaethical Reasons	Some argue that grounding morality in divine authority helps explain why moral obligations have binding force and impartial authority.

The Euthyphro Dilemma

The Euthyphro Dilemma is an ancient question that comes from Plato. It appears in one of his dialogues called Euthyphro². Even though it is over 2,000 years old, people still discuss it today because it raises really important questions about religion, morality, and ethics.

Without getting too much in the weeds about it, the question is: Is something morally good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is morally good?

Plato’s original question focused on piety within the context of the ancient Greek religion. The modern version, however, is concerned with the foundation of morality and whether moral truths depend on God or exist independently of divine commands or obligations.

Option One: Something Is Good Because God Commands It

The first response to the Euthyphro Dilemma is that actions are good simply because God commands them. Under this view, telling the truth is right because God commands honesty, helping others is good because God commands compassion, and stealing is wrong because God forbids it.

At first glance, it offers a straightforward explanation for morality and appeals to many religious believers because it places God at the foundation of right and wrong. However, this answer raises a serious concern. If actions are good only because God commands them, then morality may seem arbitrary, meaning it depends solely on God’s will rather than on any independent reason or standard.

Critics therefore ask whether lying could become good, or cruelty become right, if God were to command them. If the answer is yes, then goodness appears to rest entirely on authority and power rather than on any intrinsic moral quality. For many philosophers, this is troubling because it suggests that virtually any action could be considered good simply because God declared it to be so.

Option Two: God Commands Something Because It Is Good

The second possibility turns the first one on its head. Maybe God tells us to be honest because honesty is already good. Perhaps kindness matters not simply because God commanded it, but because kindness has moral value of its own.

But this raises another question: If God’s commands aren’t what make something good, do we really need God to explain goodness in the first place?

The answer isn’t so simple. There’s an important distinction between saying goodness doesn’t depend on God’s commands and goodness doesn’t depend on God at all.

Some religious philosophers argue that goodness comes from God’s nature rather than his commands. In this view, God is necessarily loving, just, and good. His commands don’t create goodness out of nothing. Instead, they’re reflections of his nature.

Under this explanation, God’s nature provides the foundation for what is good, while his commands can establish what we are morally obligated to do.

This avoids some of the problems with the first option, but leaves us with more questions. If God’s nature defines goodness, what does it actually mean to say that God is good? How do we know that God’s nature is good? And how would we distinguish a genuinely good divine command from one that merely claims divine authority?

Why the Euthyphro Dilemma Matters

The Euthyphro Dilemma challenges us to think more carefully about what makes something right or wrong. If something is right simply because God commands it, critics worry that morality could become arbitrary. But if God commands something because it is already right, then his commands don’t appear to be what makes it right.

Religious philosophers have proposed several responses to this dilemma, and those responses deserve to be taken seriously. But we won’t be settling the entire debate here.

For now, the important thing is that the dilemma raises a question we cannot easily dismiss: What makes an action morally right, and why should we consider ourselves obligated to do it?

And perhaps most importantly for our purposes, can we answer those questions without appealing to divine authority?

Can Morality Exist Without God?

To understand whether morality requires God, it helps to first examine the role morality plays in human life. Morality influences how people treat one another and helps communities function. In a large cross-cultural study, researchers Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse examined ethnographic records from 60 societies.³ They found broad moral approval for several cooperative behaviors, including helping family members, returning favors, supporting one’s group, and respecting property. Although their findings varied across different behaviors, the study suggests that cooperation plays an important role in how societies understand morality.

These findings suggest that morality is closely connected to human relationships and social life. People depend on one another, and many moral rules seem to help groups work together more effectively. However, there is an important difference between explaining why people hold certain moral beliefs and showing that those beliefs are actually correct.

Just because many people agree that something is good does not automatically make it good. History provides many examples of societies that approved of practices we now consider deeply wrong. A community might value loyalty to its own members while treating outsiders unfairly. Cooperation itself is not always good. People can cooperate to help one another, but they can also cooperate to harm others. Simply observing that people share certain moral beliefs does not tell us whether those beliefs are justified.

This distinction raises an important philosophical question. If morality is more than a collection of social customs or personal opinions, what makes moral beliefs true or justified? Some philosophers argue that moral obligations depend on God’s commands, as we explored through the Euthyphro dilemma. Others have attempted to explain and justify morality without appealing to divine authority.

One approach is secular moral realism, which holds that some moral claims are objectively true regardless of what any person or religion believes.⁴ Different moral realists disagree about what makes these truths true, but they share the idea that morality is not simply a matter of preference or divine command.

Another approach is contractualism, which suggests that moral principles should be ones that people could reasonably justify to one another.⁵ Under this view, morality involves finding principles for treating one another that no one could reasonably reject, even when people disagree about what they personally want.

A third approach, known as moral constructivism, explores how moral principles can be justified through rational reasoning and deliberation, rather than by discovering moral truths that exist entirely independently of that reasoning.⁶

These approaches don’t all agree, and none settles the debate. Each faces difficult questions about what makes moral principles valid, why we should follow them, and how we determine whether they’re justified. But appealing to divine authority raises philosophical questions of its own. What these approaches demonstrate is that philosophers have developed serious alternatives to grounding morality in God’s commands.

If we want to develop a secular understanding of morality, we need to do more than explain where our moral beliefs come from. We need to examine how those beliefs can be justified, how they affect other people, and whether the principles we adopt can withstand careful criticism.

These questions bring us to an idea that is far from new, but remains just as relevant today: our well-being is deeply connected to the well-being of others.

This is the foundation of an ethical approach we’ll explore here called Mutual Thriving.

Introducing Mutual Thriving

The idea that our well-being is connected to the well-being of others is hardly a new concept. Philosophers, scientists, and cultural traditions have approached this relationship in different ways, often emphasizing cooperation, reciprocity, and our responsibilities to one another.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer explores these relationships through Indigenous knowledge and ecological science. She emphasizes our responsibility to care for the natural world that sustains us, expressing this interconnectedness through a simple observation: “All flourishing is mutual.”⁷

The concept of Mutual Thriving (also called Mutual Flourishing) brings these ideas together around a simple principle: our lives do not exist in a vacuum.

Our choices affect other people, our communities, and the natural systems that sustain us. But recognizing that connection is only the beginning. If Mutual Thriving is to serve as an ethical framework, we must ask what responsibilities follow from it, how we can justify those responsibilities, and what happens when our interests conflict.

Let me give you an example from my own backyard.

Some time ago, I found myself sharing my garden with a population of snails. Like many gardeners, I could have dealt with them by putting out snail bait. But instead, I started wondering whether there was a way for us to coexist.

At first, it might seem like a small problem. They’re just snails. But the situation raised a larger question. If I had the power to eliminate them simply because they inconvenienced me, was that enough to justify doing so?

Moral Consideration Extends Beyond Humanity

Many people would not think twice about eliminating them. But why should moral concern stop at the boundaries of our own species?

Most people already recognize that causing unnecessary suffering to animals can be wrong. Even people who disagree about animal rights often acknowledge that cruelty toward animals is morally troubling. This suggests that moral consideration is not based solely on whether someone is human. Instead, it may depend on qualities such as the capacity to experience harm, pursue basic interests, or exist as a living being with its own place in the world.⁸

Mutual Thriving begins with the idea that other beings matter because our actions can affect their ability to survive and flourish. This does not mean that every living thing has the same moral value or that human needs never take priority. It simply means that the effects our choices have on other beings deserve consideration rather than dismissal.

For example, a creature might deserve consideration because it can experience suffering. We might value a living organism because it has needs and can be harmed, even when we don’t know whether it has conscious experiences. And we might protect ecosystems because their integrity and diversity matter.⁹

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

The snail problem becomes more complicated once we recognize the imbalance of power involved. The snails have very little influence over my life. I, on the other hand, have the power to destroy their habitat, poison them, or remove them entirely from the garden.

Power often creates responsibility. The more control we have over the well-being of others, the greater our obligation to consider how our choices affect them. This principle appears throughout society. Adults are expected to protect children. Pet owners are responsible for the animals in their care. Governments are expected to consider the welfare of their citizens. In each case, responsibility grows out of the ability to affect the lives of others.

Mutual Thriving extends this idea more broadly. Whenever we possess the ability to significantly help or harm another being, we acquire a reason to think carefully about how we exercise that power.

Coexistence Is Preferable to Unnecessary Harm

Recognizing responsibility does not automatically tell us what we should do. Gardens must still be maintained. Crops sometimes need protection. Conflicts of interest are real. The question is not whether harm can ever be justified, but whether it is necessary.

Suppose I can protect my garden without killing the snails. Perhaps I can relocate them, create barriers, or design the garden in a way that minimizes conflict. If these options work reasonably well, causing harm becomes harder to justify.

Mutual Thriving therefore encourages us to seek solutions that allow as many beings as possible to meet their needs while minimizing unnecessary suffering. It does not demand perfection. Instead, it asks us to consider whether coexistence is possible before resorting to harm.

Ethical Decisions Remain Open to Consideration

One strength of Mutual Thriving is that it resists simple, absolute rules. Ethical situations are often complicated. What works in one circumstance may not work in another. New information can change our understanding of a problem, and reasonable people may disagree about the best course of action.

For that reason, Mutual Thriving treats ethical decision-making as an ongoing process rather than a list of fixed answers. We should remain willing to ask questions, reconsider our assumptions, and revise our conclusions when evidence or circumstances change.

This approach values humility. Instead of assuming we already possess perfect moral knowledge, we recognize that ethical understanding develops through reflection, discussion, and experience.

Moral Actions Don’t Necessarily Require Reciprocation

A common objection to ethical systems based on cooperation is that they seem to depend on reciprocity. If I help others, should I only do so because I expect something in return?

The snail problem highlights why this expectation can be too narrow. Snails cannot repay my kindness. Nor can future generations thank us for preserving the environment they will inherit. An infant cannot repay the care they receive, but that doesn’t make the care any less morally important. Yet most people still believe they deserve moral consideration.

Mutual Thriving recognizes that moral relationships are not always transactions. The fact that another being cannot benefit us directly does not mean its well-being has no value. Sometimes acting ethically means responding to vulnerability and need rather than expecting a reward.

But Why Ought We Care About Their Well-Being?

This brings us to the deepest question. Why should we care about the well-being of others at all?

One answer is that our lives are intertwined. Human beings depend on families, communities, ecosystems, and countless relationships that make life possible. We thrive not as isolated individuals but as participants in larger networks of mutual dependence. When we contribute to conditions that allow others to flourish, we often strengthen the very systems that support our own well-being.

But Mutual Thriving goes beyond simple self-interest. It begins with the recognition that our actions can affect the lives and well-being of other creatures, even when we don’t fully understand what they experience.

If our own well-being matters to us, it becomes difficult to explain why the well-being of others should count for nothing. While reasonable people may disagree about exactly how much weight to give competing interests, recognizing that others matter provides the foundation for ethical concern.

From this perspective, morality is not merely a set of commands handed down by an authority. It is a continuing effort to navigate our shared existence in ways that promote flourishing, reduce unnecessary harm, and respect the reality that none of us lives entirely alone.

If our own well-being deserves moral consideration, we should have good reasons for denying that consideration to others.

When Ethical Choices Create Meaning

There’s another part of my little snail problem that I haven’t told you yet.

After learning more about these creatures and considering how we might coexist, I decided to create a small sanctuary for them in my garden. Somewhere they could go about their little snail lives without interfering too much with mine.

But something happened that I hadn’t anticipated. My young daughter developed a fascination with the snails. She began caring about these tiny creatures and took a genuine interest in their lives.

What started as an ordinary gardening problem had become something meaningful. I had found a way to coexist with creatures I could easily have destroyed, and in doing so, created an opportunity for my daughter to develop a connection with nature.

The snails didn’t owe us anything. They didn’t need to repay our kindness. And my decision wouldn’t have been any less worthy of consideration if my daughter had never taken an interest in them.

But that pile of moist rocks reminds me that our ethical decisions can do more than influence the world around us. They can influence how we experience that world.

Through the simple act of considering another creature’s well-being, we found meaning, connection, and a little wonder in an ordinary corner of our backyard.

No supernatural explanation required.

References

Murphy, M. C. (2025). Theological voluntarism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Read the entry ↩︎
Plato. (1914). Euthyphro (H. N. Fowler, Trans.). In Plato in twelve volumes (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press. https://atlas.perseus.tufts.edu/library/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg001.perseus-eng2/ (Original work composed in the fourth century BCE.) ↩︎
Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47–69. Read the study ↩︎
Sayre-McCord, G. (2026). Moral realism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2026 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2026/entries/moral-realism/ ↩︎
Ashford, E., & Mulgan, T. (2018). Contractualism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2018 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/contractualism/ ↩︎
Bagnoli, C. (2026). Constructivism in metaethics. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2026 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2026/entries/constructivism-metaethics/ ↩︎
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. https://milkweed.org/braiding-sweetgrass?utm_source=chatgpt.com ↩︎
Gruen, L., & Monsó, S. (2024). The moral status of animals. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2024 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/moral-animal/ ↩︎
Brennan, A., & Lo, N. Y. S. (2024). Environmental ethics. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2024 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/ethics-environmental/ ↩︎

November 1, 2026

Can Something Be Sacred Without Being Supernatural?

To someone else, a photograph of someone you love might be little more than a piece of paper, complete with faded colors, worn edges, and a coffee stain from that unfortunate incident three years ago. To you, however, that photograph might be irreplaceable.

Maybe you’ve framed it, or maybe you just handle it carefully and keep it somewhere safe. How much would it hurt if someone deliberately destroyed it?

There’s absolutely nothing supernatural about that photograph. Its physical properties can be explained through a basic understanding of physics and chemistry. Yet somehow, it means much more to you than the sum of its parts.

Could something like your photograph be considered sacred?

For many people, the idea of sacredness is inseparable from religion. The word immediately brings to mind things like scriptures, temples, divine commandments, or objects believed to hold spiritual significance.

But is it really a supernatural connection that makes something sacred? Or can sacredness also exist as a distinctly human experience?

To explore that question, we first have to understand what we mean when we describe something as sacred.

What Makes Something Sacred?

The word sacred doesn’t have a single definition. In fact, its meaning can be rather muddy. Dictionaries do their best to convey an understanding of it. Dictionary.com¹, for example, gives seven different definitions of this adjective.

Some of these definitions would suggest that I’m using the word sacred in the entirely wrong way. But I think there’s something interesting going on here. For the purposes of this discussion, I think these seven definitions can be organized into three broad categories:

Definitions	Understanding of Sacredness
1–3	Religious Sacredness: Something set apart through its relationship with divinity, religion, or religious practices.
4–5	Relational Sacredness: Something treated with special reverence because of its personal, cultural, or symbolic significance.
6–7	Moral Sacredness: Something considered worthy of protection against violence or interference.

What’s interesting to me is that, despite their differences, these definitions all describe something we recognize as sacred. Somehow, these seemingly distinct meanings share enough in common that we use the same word to describe them.

So, what exactly do they have in common?

I would propose that the common thread between all these definitions is this:

To be sacred is to be regarded as possessing such exceptional significance that it deserves a particular degree of reverence, respect, or protection.

“Sacred” vs. “Important”

Sacredness is something more than just believing something to be important.

Consider the photograph again, then consider these two ways of describing it.

“The photograph is important to me.”
“The photograph is sacred to me.”

The first communicates that the photograph has special value to you, but the second conveys something extra. It suggests a sense of reverence and respect. If someone damaged or destroyed that photograph, it could feel like a grievous violation.

Where Does Sacredness Come From?

But that raises another question: Where does that extraordinary significance come from?

Is sacredness something inherent in an object, something that exists independently of our perception? Or is it something that emerges from the ways we understand, value, and interact with the world around us?

In his influential 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, sociologist Émile Durkheim proposed that one of religion’s defining characteristics is the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

Here, profane doesn’t necessarily mean offensive or disrespectful. It refers to the ordinary aspects of everyday life. Sacred things, by contrast, are set apart. They are treated differently, surrounded by special rules, practices, or expectations².

A religious text might be handled with extraordinary care. A memorial might be approached with silence and respect. A particular place might be preserved because of its importance to a community.

What makes these examples interesting is that their significance cannot be explained by their physical characteristics alone. A book remains a book. A monument remains a structure of stone or metal. But their meanings influence how people relate to them.

Durkheim was studying religion, so his definition doesn’t automatically establish the existence of sacredness outside religious traditions. Nevertheless, it provides an important insight: sacredness isn’t necessarily a claim about what something is made of. It also concerns how something is understood and treated.

But Durkheim took this idea even further.

He argued that sacredness was closely connected to the ways communities understand and organize their lives. Through shared beliefs, traditions, and rituals, societies can come to regard certain objects, places, and even ideas as sacred.

In fact, Durkheim pointed to the French Revolution as an example. During that period, concepts such as Liberty, Reason, and the Fatherland acquired a kind of sacred significance. These were not supernatural entities, yet people treated them with a reverence resembling religious devotion.

Now, it’s worth remembering that Durkheim was primarily interested in the collective nature of sacredness: how entire communities come to share these attitudes. Our cherished photograph, on the other hand, illustrates a more personal form of reverence.

Nevertheless, his work raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps sacredness isn’t always something we discover within an object. Perhaps, at least sometimes, it’s something that emerges from our relationships with that object, with one another, and with the meanings we create together.

Must the Sacred Be Supernatural?

Imagine two people standing in a forest. The first believes that the forest is inhabited by spirits. To them, it is a sacred place because of its connection to something supernatural.

The second doesn’t believe in spirits or anything supernatural. But they see the forest as something extraordinary: a living ecosystem that has existed for centuries, supporting countless organisms and connecting generations of people to the natural world.

Both might feel a profound sense of reverence toward the forest. Both might believe it deserves protection from destruction. But their explanations of why the forest deserves that reverence are fundamentally different.

This demonstrates an important point: A claim about what something is isn’t necessarily the same as a judgment about what something means or how it deserves to be treated.

If someone claims that spirits inhabit a forest, they’re making a claim about reality, and that claim would need to stand on its own evidence. But if someone says that the forest is sacred to them because of its beauty, ecological significance, or personal meaning, they’re expressing something entirely different: their relationship of value and reverence.

This is an important distinction.

For example, a religious person might believe that human life is sacred because it was created by God. A nonreligious person might regard human life as sacred because of its capacity for conscious experience, relationships, suffering, and flourishing.

Similarly, a religious person might find the Earth sacred because it was the product of a creative deity, while a nonreligious person might find the Earth sacred because it is irreplaceable and vital for life. (That’s why I keep all my stuff here.)

Religious studies scholar Ann Taves explored a related distinction in her 2009 book, Religious Experience Reconsidered. Rather than treating religious experiences as a separate and inherently religious category, Taves proposed examining how people come to identify experiences as religious or otherwise special³.

Her approach encourages us to distinguish between an experience itself and the interpretations people give to that experience. By doing so, we can investigate experiences of extraordinary significance without assuming that they originate from supernatural forces. If sacredness doesn’t necessarily require supernatural belief, what can psychology tell us about the experiences of awe, reverence, and profound significance that people sometimes describe as sacred?

The Psychology of Sacred Experiences

Have you ever looked up at a star-filled night sky or stood before an enormous mountain and suddenly felt very small? Psychologists have a name for the emotion we sometimes experience in moments like these: awe.

In a 2003 paper, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt identified two central features of awe: a perception of vastness and a need for accommodation⁴.

Vastness doesn’t necessarily refer to physical size. It can also involve an extraordinary idea, accomplishment, or experience. The need for accommodation occurs when we must reconsider how we understand something in order to make sense of it.

(For more on this subject, see my article The Science of Awe.)

Neither of these features inherently requires anything supernatural. But what does awe have to do with sacredness?

In 2017, psychologists Jesse Preston and Faith Shin explored this relationship through five studies involving a total of 1,064 participants.

They asked participants to recall experiences they considered spiritual and examined the emotions associated with those memories.

The researchers found that recalling spiritual experiences increased feelings of awe in both religious and nonreligious participants. They also identified a phenomenon known as the small self: a feeling of personal smallness in relation to something perceived as much greater than oneself⁵.

Interestingly, the kinds of experiences participants recalled often differed depending on their religious beliefs, or lack thereof. Religious participants were more likely to describe explicitly religious experiences, while nonreligious participants more frequently described encounters with nature, science, meditation, and other extraordinary experiences.

Different explanations, but some remarkably similar emotional responses.

More recently, researchers Misaki Fujii and colleagues⁶ investigated sacred experiences among three groups: religious individuals, people who described themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” and people who identified as neither religious nor spiritual.

Across two studies, they found that people in all three groups reported sacred experiences, although religious participants reported them most frequently, followed by spiritual-but-not-religious participants, and then those who identified as neither.

There’s an interesting detail about how the researchers approached this question. They used the phrase deeply meaningful moment to avoid discouraging nonreligious participants who might associate the word sacred exclusively with religion.

That distinction is important, particularly for our discussion.

Researchers can study experiences of profound meaning, awe, and reverence without requiring participants to interpret those experiences through a religious framework.

We should, however, be careful not to confuse these findings with proof that sacredness exists as some independent property of the universe. Nor should we assume that every experience of awe is sacred.

Watching an impressive fireworks display might inspire awe without creating any lasting sense of reverence. Conversely, our cherished photograph might remain sacred to us even when looking at it doesn’t provoke any particularly intense emotion.

Awe describes an emotional experience. Sacredness, as we’ve defined it, also involves the significance we assign to something and how we believe it deserves to be treated.

What the research suggests is that some of the psychological experiences associated with sacredness are not exclusive to religious believers. The feelings are real, even when people disagree about what causes them or what they mean. But if sacredness emerges from human experience, interpretation, and relationships, does that make it any less meaningful?

Does Human-Created Meaning Count?

And that might be our toughest philosophical question for the day. After all, if human beings assign sacredness to something, doesn’t that make it imaginary?

Not necessarily.

Consider a promise. A promise is not a physical substance. You cannot examine it beneath a microscope or identify the atoms that make it binding. And yet promises can profoundly influence human relationships. They create expectations, establish responsibilities, and affect how people treat one another.

Their consequences are real, even though their significance depends on human minds and social relationships.

The same could be said of friendship, traditions, cultural heritage, and many of the values that guide our lives. Something does not become meaningless simply because its meaning emerges through human experience.

But that doesn’t mean all interpretations are equally reasonable.

Our beliefs about what deserves special respect can be questioned. We can examine whether those beliefs are consistent with evidence, whether they cause harm, and whether they reflect values we are prepared to defend.

The photograph we considered earlier is not sacred because its paper contains some mysterious property.

It is precious because of the history, relationships, and memories it represents.

Its significance is not diminished by understanding where that significance comes from.

An explanation for why something matters is not necessarily an argument that it doesn’t matter.

The Danger of Making Things Sacred

There is, however, a potential problem with sacredness that deserves serious consideration. When people describe something as sacred, they may also begin treating it as beyond criticism.

Psychologist Philip Tetlock⁷ explored how people respond when deeply held values are placed in conflict with ordinary practical considerations. His work on sacred values and taboo trade-offs examined why people sometimes react with moral outrage to the suggestion that certain values should be negotiated or exchanged.

Such commitments can help people resist exploitation or defend what they consider essential, but they can also make difficult questions harder to discuss.

Throughout history, beliefs and institutions treated as sacred have sometimes been used to justify harmful practices and discourage dissent. It is absolutely paramount that a secular understanding of sacredness does not repeat that mistake.

If we decide that human dignity deserves extraordinary respect, that commitment should encourage us to examine how people are treated, not prevent us from questioning our understanding of dignity.

If we regard nature as sacred, that should inspire thoughtful stewardship, not require us to abandon scientific understanding.

And if we treasure a tradition, we should remain free to reconsider it when it no longer serves the people who practice it.

Sacredness, understood this way, should encourage responsibility rather than demand unquestioning obedience.

Finding the Sacred in an Ordinary Universe

So, can something be sacred without being supernatural?

I think it can.

If sacredness describes the extraordinary significance we recognize in something, and the reverence and responsibility that follow from it, then there’s no inherent reason that significance must come from beyond the natural world.

Remember that photograph we talked about earlier? Understanding the chemistry of its paper or the physics of light doesn’t diminish the love, memories, or relationships it represents. Knowing why something matters to us doesn’t necessarily make it matter any less. And perhaps the same can be said of sacredness.

But don’t just take my word for it.

Take a moment to look around you. Think about the people in your life, the places you’ve been, the memories you’ve made, or the principles you hold dear.

Is there something you regard with such extraordinary significance that you feel it deserves a special kind of reverence or protection? What makes it so meaningful? And how does that meaning influence the way you treat it?

You don’t have to call it sacred. That’s entirely up to you.

But perhaps sacredness doesn’t have to be something we discover beyond the natural world.Perhaps it’s one of the ways we choose to relate to the world we already inhabit.

References

Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Sacred. In Dictionary.com. Retrieved October 21, 2026, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sacred ↩︎
Durkheim, É. (1915). The elementary forms of the religious life (J. W. Swain, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1912). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41360/41360-h/41360-h.htm ↩︎
Taves, A. (2009). Religious experience reconsidered: A building-block approach to the study of religion and other special things. Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rtvt ↩︎
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297 ↩︎
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October 21, 2026