| Theism | God is personally involved with humankind. | Universe is divinely created and purposive, nature is controlled by God, history is linear. | Humans are stewards of creation, created in God’s image. | Homer, Virgil, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien |
| Deism | God was present but is no longer active. | The world functions like a clock, created by God but now runs on its own. | Humanity follows Judeo-Christian morality. | Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson |
| Romanticism | God is identified with nature. | Nature is idealized, truth and good are relative and changing. | Humans are complex animals, driven by intuition. | James Fenimore Cooper, Goethe |
| Naturalism | God is either uninterested or mean (if He exists). | Reality is governed by impersonal natural laws, life is transient, truth is culture-conditioned. | Humanity’s ultimate destination is death. | Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane |
| Realism | No God, no purpose or meaning in the universe. | Reality is harsh, only measurable experiences are real, bad things happen to good people. | Personality has no ultimate status, human rights are conditional. | Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Absurdism | No god, no need for one. | Everything is disorganized, anarchy rules, there is no cosmic explanation. | Indifference towards existence and deities. | John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. |
| Existentialism | God is irrelevant, truth is relative. | Reality is subjective and open to interpretation, leading to pessimism. | Humans must create their own meaning. | Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre |