Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it's time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.

It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.

Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.