‘The Non-Personal Universe of Being’: An Intellectual and Moral Platform for the ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’ Person

By Glauco Frizzera

In what appears today a divided and unmoored world, in which religion is relied upon less and less to give guidance, "a substantial – and rising – share of the [USA] public (27% in 2017, up from 19% in 2012) call themselves spiritual but not religious" (Pew Research Center, 2017). What can these people do in such situation? Where can they turn to? In this small book a like-minded fellow traveler shares his reflections on how to confront these troubling times without a personal God and attempts to provide not only a coherent intellectual framework, but also consequent, general ethical guidelines, both based on the novel idea of the non-personal Universe of Being.

This booklet is a reworking for a larger audience of separate articles dealing with various aspects of it. Four of them have been published in peer reviewed journals of philosophy and spirituality and one is new. Except for one chapter, the work is "philosophical" only in the very general sense of philosophy as "love of wisdom". It is better seen as an extended personal meditation, supported by philosophical ideas acquired during years of reading from many diverse sources. Paramount, however, is the influence of the great American psychologist, William James, with his The varieties of religious experience, and of one of the foremost neo-Thomistic philosophers of the last century, Jacques Maritain.





Glauco Frizzera, M.D. is a retired academic pathologist (formerly at the University of Minnesota, New York University, the Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as the AFIP). In retirement, he has been looking for answers to essential questions about the human condition, first from a Catholic perspective, then from that of a 'spiritual but not religious' person. He believes he has found a reasonable, coherent and useful response to many of them in the central idea expounded here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667888484

Book preview

BK90075330.jpg

ISBN 978-1-66788-848-4

All rights reserved.

© 2023 Glauco Frizzera

In memory of my parents, Piera and Ezio

To Edmund T. Ty

‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’

(You were not made to live like brutes,

But to follow virtue and knowledge.)

Dante, Inferno, XXVI, 119-20

The images on the cover offer views of the Dolomites, Italy (above)

and of the Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, HI (below).

Table of Contents

Preface

Endnotes

I. First Pillar: A ‘Beyond’ Exists

1. The Existence of a ‘Beyond’

2. What is This ‘Beyond’ Made of?

2.1 Is it ‘personal’?

2.2. Or is it ‘non-personal’?

Endnotes

II. Second Pillar: Substances

1. Introduction

2. Existentials

3. Substances: Their Existence and Essence

3.1 The existence of substances

3.2 The general essence of substances

3.3 The individual essence of substances

4. Being

5. The Non-Personal Universe of Being

6. Further Comparisons

Endnotes

III. Being and Evil: Revisiting ‘Privatio Boni’

1. The Good: the Endless Expansion of Being

2. The Bad: Evil

3. Natural Evil

4. Moral Evil

5. Privatio Entis and the Nature of Evil

6. The Consequent Approach to Everyday Life

Endnotes

IV. ‘The Universe of Being’: Some Implications of an Idea

1. Looking for the Being around Us

2. Encountering the Universe of Being Itself?

3. Creating Being

Endnotes

V. Life and Afterlife: Clues from the ‘Non-Personal Universe of Being’

1. Introduction

2. The Meaning of Life

2.1 What do we mean by meaning?

2.2 What is life?

2.3 What is the purpose of life?

3. Life in the Light of the Non-Personal Universe of Being

4. Afterlife in the Light of the Non-Personal Universe of Being

4.1. The fate of the individual essences of substances

4.2 What of man’s individual essence?

4.3 Resurrection?

Endnotes

Epilogue

Endnotes

References

Autobiographical note

Preface

We have entered an era in which the moral disorder that is always present in the human world has become so pervasive and unsettling that we need to rouse ourselves. On the one hand, we need to remember that there is an entirely different world out there, where decency, honesty, truth, and love of neighbors still count and keep our society going. On the other hand, we need to hang on to something higher in human life: philosophy, music, arts, sciences and ‘aretê’ over the good life. People of a speculative sort of mind might need to re-examine their beliefs and their potential actions.

Others may look further, for some coherent framework that help them confront these troubling times. Among them are the so-called ‘spiritual, but not religious’ people. These are squeezed, so to speak, between the believer and the atheist. For the former, calling oneself spiritual is taken as an excuse not to get down to the serious business of believing and acting accordingly to those beliefs. The latter is always looking with suspicion at any explanation beyond scientific materialism, seeing it as a retreat of reason and as a slippery road to perdition (religion). What has a ‘spiritual, but not religious’ person to do? Where to turn to? I would like here to propose to such a person - a fellow traveler, a rational foundation, a platform, as it were, on which to anchor a position different from those of both the religious and the atheist.

But I need first to better characterize the audience to which I am addressing it, as the term ‘spiritual but not religious’ is somewhat vague and open to different interpretations. In a very recent survey (Anonymous 2018), in which the Pew Research Center asked over 4,700 American adults whether they believe in God or not, three groups stood out: 56% believe in God as described in the Bible; 33% believe in a higher power of some kind (but not in the biblical God); and 10% do not believe in any God or higher power of any sort. It is the intermediate group of 33% that expresses the widest diversity of beliefs.

In particular, for some, the non-biblical higher power they believe in still retains in different degrees the traits of a personal God. Which is quite natural. As the cognitive science of religion has demonstrated, of the available ontological categories, a god is best understood as Person (Tremlin 2006, 95). "Gods are first and foremost intentional agents, beings with minds: through the rich interferences generated around this core structure, gods have all the qualities and salience as real agents in the world" (Tremlin, 102). To these, theological tradition has added a whole set of attributes (omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience….) (Tremlin, 97).

However, in the Pew survey there remains a number of adults for whom the higher power or spiritual force they believe in does not have one or more of the characteristics attached to a ‘person’: it does not love all people (31%), does not know everything (47%) or have power to direct things (61%), does not protect (32%) or reward (47%) the believer and so on. It is especially, but not only, this final group, for whom the nature of the higher power is unsettled, that I address in the following reflections.

The proposal of a non-personal ‘Universe of Being’ is my response to a long and unsuccessful search for a personal God, which foundered, as it happens most often, on the rock of the existence of evil and entailed three critical, frustrating innermost experiences. One is what theologians love to label, with a term that neither explains nor consoles, Deus absconditus, a God with whom I was never able to connect, despite all honest efforts, and who never spoke to me. Another was the useless attempt to find a solution to the bitter enigma of a good and omnipotent God who allows the maiming of His creation by evil (moral evil and natural ‘woes’). Unfortunately, outside the realm of faith, no theodicy works, as Kant recognized,¹ not even most recent ones from progressive theologians (Griffin 2001), despite their renouncing major Christian doctrines (e.g., the omnipotence of God or creation ex nihilo) (Barbour 1997, 300-304). Finally, along with spiritual and philosophical failures, I felt growing with age the stress of too often repeated tragedies, daily experiences of blatant injustice, political and social disorder, and unending affronts to truth, honesty and decency in our new age.

The sum of all this amounted to daunting challenging questions that I confronted for way too long: HOW else to explain this world? and WHAT to do? My answers lie in this book. In it I argue for the notion of a non-personal Universe of Being as a reasonable alternative explanation, whose fertility is proven by the necessity I felt to expound in successive articles its implications in ontology and ethics. And in it I offer the response