Naturalism and Religion

Rudolf Otto wrote this book at a moment when science seemed poised to explain everything, and religion found itself on the defensive. His argument is elegant and radical: naturalism, for all its explanatory power, cannot account for a distinctive dimension of human experience that he calls the 'numinous' - the encounter with something wholly other, mysterious, and transcendent. Science explains how the world works; religion asks what it means, and that question refuses to dissolve under scientific scrutiny. Otto traces the conflict between these two frameworks not as adversaries waging war, but as competing answers to the same fundamental human impulse: the need to make sense of existence. He examines how religious experience cannot be reduced to psychology or sociology without losing what makes it religious. The book anticipates the themes Otto would develop more fully in 'The Idea of the Holy' and remains essential reading for anyone who wants to think honestly about the limits of science and the persistence of the sacred.