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Jonathan McCormack
8 min readMar 20, 2023

Could the Cosmos be a Person ?

Reality itself is personal, and only discloses its true nature to those that approach it as such, intending a loving relationship.

Rather than personhood being something attained at a certain level of evolution or development in the cosmos, Norris Clarke claims that existence itself is personal, and all things that are not persons — rocks, dirt, your old car — are not persons because they are constricted in their being.

It is as if some constraining device diminished the personal aspects of beings, so they only existed in some diminished form.

Norris Clarke tells us,

“…. the person is not something added on to being as a special delimitation; it is simply what being is when allowed to be at its fullest, freed from the constrictions of subintelligent matter.”

There’s also a way in which the cosmos being a person is quite literal, Stephen R.L. Clark in his God, Religion and Reality writes :

“A human person requires a cosmos to sustain it: of anyone it is literally true that the whole world is her body, since the light of the sun, and the respiration of algae, are essential to her bodily survival.

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