What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

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.

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."

Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people - with whom you disagree very much.