By Victor M Fontane
For centuries most humans, specially in the western part of the world, have been taught to believe in a God who up to now has not been able to be understood nor seen and base belief in his existence on faith alone. In this way he ceases to be a cosmic God and becomes a personal God.
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam. One of the foremost exponents of 17th-century Rationalism and one of the early and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment.
As understood by Spinoza, God is the one infinite substance who possesses an infinite number of attributes each expressing an eternal aspect of his/her nature. He believes this is so due to the definition of God being equivalent to that of substance, or that which causes itself. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve.
In the Ethics, Spinoza demonstrates the existence of God, but his conception of God is radically different from the anthropomorphic idea of God. For Spinoza, God is not distinct from nature, but inseparable from it because he is an absolutely infinite substance.
Spinoza denied free-will, because it was inconsistent with the nature of God, and with the laws to which human actions are subject. … There is nothing really contingent. Contingency, free determination, disorder, chance, lie only in our ignorance.
Albert Einstein loved Spinoza because many of Spinoza's ideas resonated with him and seemed plausible to Einstein. Although Spinoza's methodology was not always correct, many of his ideas and intuitions were sensible and proven to be true. He believed in Spinoza's god, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
Spinoza disagreed fundamentally with Christianity. He denied the personality of God essential to the Christian faith. He did not comprehend the meaning of Christ's incarnation, but believed that Jesus perceived and taught the highest truths.
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