John Hick on the Role of Cosmic Optimism and Culture in the Meaning of Life

Abstract

The question of the “meaning of life” has always studied by philosophers like John Hick and led them to make an explanation regarding their philosophical bases about it. John Hick mentions “the meaning of life” in his work based on the concepts he borrows from Wittgenstein and Kant and states that the meaning of life depends on an interrelation between the human and the world. Thus, he inevitably talks about the world as a place in which the human experiences his life and then he relates the explanation of the world to the cosmic optimism. He, then, thinks that the cosmic optimism depends on religious beliefs. Therefore, he makes a turn from the question of “the meaning of life” to the question of “the world’s nature” and then, from the “world’s nature” to “the religious features which give us better judgments about the world”. The article is going to explain his point of view about the meaning of life regarding his ideas about critical realism and then, is going to consider the results and notes about it such as being allocated merely to Abrahamic religions, being not general and being no implication between cosmic optimism and religious belief.

Keywords

• the meaning of life
• the practical meaning of life
• john hick
• cosmic optimism