Last Tuesday, December 16, the group of research Science, Reason and Faith (CRYF) of the University of Navarra invited Professor Camino Cañón Loyes, of the Chair of Science, Technology and Religionof the Comillas Pontifical Universityto give a lecture on seminar "Naturalized Spirituality".

The speaker began by noting the fact that there is currently a rejection of the spirituality transmitted in the past. "In the tradition of thought we can say that the search for the meaning of life was forged in the three points of a triangle: at the upper vertex was God; at the second vertex was nature and at the third vertex was the human being. In modernity, nature moves to the upper vertex and a spirituality emerges that nourishes the human spirit without the need to turn to God," he said.

In 2007 Marià Corbí published "Towards a secular spirituality", whose thesis is to affirm that the human being can reach spirituality without God, without religions, without beliefs. This current is called "Naturalized Spirituality". Professor Cañón Loyes analyzed the texts of two American authors: Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" and Owen Flanagan, who wrote "The Really Hard Problem".

Exploring this terrain, a true achievement of the evolved primate, will depend on how our speech proceeds on religion (Harris), so that it no longer makes sense to speak of "religious experience" and we can only speak of "spiritual experience". Thus, the really hard problem consists in finding a scientific explanation that accounts for a spirituality without God (Flanagan).

Throughout the exhibition, and in the subsequent colloquium , the speaker highlighted the difficulties and inconsistencies of the pretension of establishing this subject of naturalized spirituality or, in other words, of achieving a kind of "holiness" without God.