Given a sign: Neil Morgan on two Quaker paths

‘Is everyday a blessing?’

by Neil Morgan 5th June 2026

I have found two signposts within myself as I approach Quaker worship. 

The first I read as ‘the religious and transcendent way’. Thomas Aquinas and others  used the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’ to define a Creator not as an entity in this world, nor indeed in a supernatural world, but in a different register: beyond us; transcendent. This is what Rudolf Otto described in The Idea of the Holy. By contrast, there is the view of atheists such as Alfred Ayer, and before him David Hume. They deflate the religious balloon.