THE POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTION OF AWE AND NATURE APPRECIATION TO POSITIVE MORAL VALUES: with Willem B. Drees, “Naturalism and Religion: Hunting Two Snarks?”; Ursula W. Goodenough and Jeremy E. Sherman, “The Emergence of Selves and Purpose”; Matthew D. MacKenzie, “Spiritual Animals: Sense-Making, Self-Transcendence, and Liberal Naturalism”; Curtis M. Craig, “The Potential Contribution of Awe and Nature Appreciation to Positive Moral Values”; Mark E. Hoelter, “Mysterium Tremendum in a New Key”; Charles W. Fowler, “The Convergence of Science and Religion”; Todd Macalister, “Naturalistic Religious Practices: What Naturalists Have Been Discussing and Doing”; Paul H. Carr, “Theologies Completing Naturalism's Limitations”; James Sharp, “Theistic Evolution in Three Traditions”; Alessandro Mantini, “Religious Naturalism and Creation: A Cosmological and Theological Reading on the Origin/Beginning of the Universe”; and Willem B. Drees, “When to Be What? Why Science-Inspired Naturalism Need Not Imply Religious Naturalism.”

The 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.