PhilosophersBaruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza

God, that is, Nature: everything follows by necessity.

Rationalism1632 – 1677 NetherlandsRationalistThinker of God-or-NatureDeterministDefender of freedom of thought
Ethics I, props. 11-15 and 29; IV, preface

God, or Nature

What it claims

God exists, but not as a creator outside the world: God is Nature itself. "God, or Nature."

Why

Only one reality can exist by itself: everything else is part of it and follows from it of necessity.

Valid with an implicit premise

Spinoza sets out to prove that God exists, and even that God cannot fail to exist. But this God is not a creator who chooses, judges and loves like a person: it is Nature itself. That is why we file it under pantheism (the word postdates Spinoza), even though he affirms that God exists. His contemporaries accused him of atheism; he rejected the charge.

P1God, the absolutely infinite being, necessarily exists: his very nature implies that he exists.
P2Apart from God, no other substance can exist (no other reality that exists by itself).
P3Everything that exists is either a substance or a way of being of a substance. If there is only one substance, everything is therefore in God.
P4Everything follows from God's nature by necessity, as a triangle's properties follow from its definition, and not from a will that could have chosen otherwise.
P5 · implicit premiseThat in which everything exists and which produces everything by the necessity of its nature is exactly what we call Nature, in the strong sense ("Nature naturing").
Therefore God exists, but not as a creator outside the world: God is Nature itself. "God, or Nature."

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where everything is in God and produced by necessity, but God is not Nature: the position now called "panentheism" (everything is in God, but God exceeds the world).
With P5 the conclusion follows. Without it, one could accept that everything is in God and follows from him by necessity, yet keep a God distinct from nature and greater than it. Spinoza does not write it as a premise, because for him it is almost a definition. The historical debate is mostly about P1 (a proof starting from the mere definition of God), P2 (two substances could not share an attribute) and P4 (a God without choice).
Analogy. Think of the ocean and its waves. Waves are not made by the ocean the way a potter makes a vase: they are the ocean itself taking this or that shape. For Spinoza, we are waves and God is the ocean. The image is not his; it only helps to grasp the idea of an "immanent" cause.

Objections

6

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

H
Hugo Boxel 1674 · attacks premise 4

If you attribute necessity to God and deprive him of will and free choice, you turn the infinitely perfect being into a kind of monster. We do not understand how God acts, but we must grant him willing and understanding, in a way higher than ours ("eminently").

Spinoza replies
Spinoza
You think there is no higher perfection than willing, seeing, hearing. But if a triangle could speak, it would likewise say that God is eminently triangular. Everyone lends God their own features.
Kant 1781 · attacks premise 1

One cannot draw a thing's existence from its definition alone: "being" is not one more quality in the definition. To deny that God exists is to remove the subject with all its qualities, and there is no contradiction in that. Kant targets every proof of this kind (called ontological), Descartes' as much as Spinoza's.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1781, after the author's death (1677).
Leibniz 1678 · attacks premise 2

To show there is only one substance, Spinoza holds that two substances cannot share an attribute (Ethics I, prop. 5). But two substances could share one attribute and differ by others. Then nothing prevents there being several substances (Leibniz's notes on the Ethics, around 1678).

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1678, after the author's death (1677).
A
A common objection from believers attacks the conclusion

A God who loves no one and cannot be prayed to is no longer God: it is nature given a religious name.

Spinoza replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Spinoza
God has no passions and loves no one in the human way. But in so far as he loves himself, he loves humans: God's love for humans and the mind's intellectual love of God are one and the same.
P
Pierre Bayle 1697 · attacks premise 3

If everything is in God, God is at once the soldier who kills and the man killed, the executioner and the victim. He contradicts himself and suffers in each of us: that is absurd. Bayle calls Spinoza a "systematic atheist".

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1697, after the author's death (1677).
Leibniz 1710 · attacks premise 4

Spinoza teaches a blind necessity and denies God understanding and will. Yet many possible things do not exist, like the novels we can imagine: so God chose the best among possible worlds.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1710, after the author's death (1677).