How is Spinoza's God still God?

Question

Is it conscious or what? I don't really understand it.

Answer 1

Nietzsche said, "God is Dead." But Spinoza dealt the death blow long before Nietzsche came along.

The following statements would apply to people who lived and believed before Spinoza and Newton:

If God inflicts his personality and will power on us, and if God is jealous, like it says in the Old Testament...then how can science ever be primary in terms of offering a reliable consistent picture of our physical environment? As long as people picture God as an anthropomorphic all-seeing-being who tinkers with us on a daily basis, then what point is there to be passionate about science and technology?

Enter Spinoza. Rather than God being a disassociated individual who rules from on high, Spinoza would hold that God is more of an essence which permeates all things, every molecule and every idea in the universe is permeated with the essence of God. In this way, God is part and parcel of the natural order of the universe, which we seek to apprehend through scientific discovery.

Answer 2

The way that Spinoza argues it is that there is only one substance, and then that there is only one individual of that substance. In the tradition of Anselm and Descartes, God is a "Necessary Being," who cannot possibly not exist. Existence is part of his essence, and he cannot be without it. But existence is not the entire essence of God. Instead, the one substance is characterized by an infinite number of attributes. Besides existence, we are only aware of two of these: thought and extension. Thus, where Descartes had seen thought as the unique essence of the substance soul, and extension as the unique essence of the substance matter, Spinoza abolished this dualism, and the paradoxes it generated. Thought and extension are just two, out of an infinite number of, facets of Being.Therefore i think its safe to say that god exists as a force of conscious essence (sort of like sentient disembodied power) effecting change and consequence by his very existence. What if in the "big bang", creation wasn't jump started but the newly born universe achieved a sentience of sorts and this sentience became the force we refer to as god?That would stand to be more reasonable when stating that all consciousness has one source and must return to that source eventually. That would also allow for the statement that god is the "all" since such a sentience would span the entire length and breadth of the cosmos as we know it. Thereby adding to the statement,"i am the alpha and the omega". The universe would cease to exist when that sentience ceased to exist for its life is the universe's life as well. God was never mentioned to be of the flesh instead as genesis states there was god and others like him who made man in their image.Man had no tangible body at that time until he was formed from earth by god. Man was an intangible entity much like the wind except he, just like his god and those others, had achieved sentience. So it stands to reason that spinoza's god is much like a force of nature,an unnatural phenomena effecting change just by thinking or making his intangible desires and thoughts tangible.We exist because god exists. Angels are said to be the thoughts and ideas of god, so that would make us his creations by design. And when he ceases to exist, we cease to exist. For the thoughts cannot surpass the boundary of the finite, therefore we cannot go on without the thinker.In that case another point is raised...a really good one...do we die because god stops thinking about us or when his attention shifts to someone or something more interesting?

Answer 3

His God is not the God of revelation and that is precisely what he wants.