I doubt that we can ever step back all the way to nowhere. Even when we look at the world from somewhere else […], we are still looking at the world. We are looking, in fact, at a particular world; we may see it with special clarity, but we will not discover anything that isn’t already there. Since the particular world is also our own world, we will not discover anything that isn’t already here. Perhaps this is a general truth about secular (moral) discoveries; if so, it suggests what we lose when we lose our belief in God.

Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism