When Spinoza writes about God, it is not in the anthropomorphic sense of a God as usually portrayed by the Christian-Judaeo or Muslim varieties of religious scripture, i.e., very much like a person with human-like traits,  an authoritarian or father figure perhaps.  Someone who seems to take an active and personal interest in what the creatures he created here on earth are up to.

(And, it should be noted, demonstrating a personality  featuring some of the more regrettable human traits I can think of, such as being  narrow minded, vain, jealous, as well as being vindictive and vengeful! Anyone familiar with the Old Testament will know exactly what I am referring to!)

Does this mean that Spinoza was an atheist?  Not really, since he holds that God is the one and only unique and indivisible substance that the universe is made of. There are no other substances. The view is a bit more complex than that, and involves perceiving this substance through a variety of distinct attributes – such as Thought and Extension – but not its basic premise.

It is interesting to note that Albert Einstein – also once accused of being an atheist – followed Spinoza in rejecting the  anthropological concept of God,  saying,  instead,  that he believed in “… Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world”.

So the point would be that, if God is everything, and everything is God,  this will render the concept of a distinct metaphysical entity over and above the world – the great creator –  logically and semantically empty (i.e., meaningless) since it doesn’t signify anything over and above the totality of the cosmos, and the name “God” ends up being just another label for it.

However, the way I see it is that the way most people accept the existence of a God is along the lines of believing  something far less profound, e.g., believing that the earth is round. One accepts this to be a true fact about the world since it fits in with what you have been told about the world,  from the time you heard it first mentioned, from what you heard at school or from what you have read about it.  As such, accepting the truth of such a belief and  most other beliefs one holds as true is a function of coherence with other beliefs that seem to support it, giving you no reason to examine it critically or ever doubt it for that matter.

I’m willing to concede however that  – when people say they believe in God – they might be expressing more than just something that they have always accepted as true, such as the belief that the earth is round. What may be referred to as “spiritual beliefs” are the results of having a sense or an awareness that one is part of something larger and more profound than oneself while being unable to cite the specific reason for believing this to be a true belief about themselves and the world.  An example of that might be what Einstein wrote about in a  November 9, 1930 New York Times Magazine article  titled Religion and Science  in the context of what he referred to as “a third stage of religious experience”:

I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

Beliefs based on such feelings  may have some intrinsic credibility based on the phenomenological nature of our everyday experiences, when one is led to expect a greater context for them beyond the immediacy of the present moment and whatever else one might bring to bear on them. It is within this expectation or awareness that one might ascribe to the possibility of a deity existing, especially when one is told from day one that there is such a thing as an all-powerful being named God, and being at the receiving end of a process I call “religious brainwashing” at the hands of some authoritarian religious institution that does not allow its core dogmas to be challenged.

Given this line of reasoning, you could say that the belief in God merely fills the void in one’s belief system that resulted from sensing the larger whole of one’s existence without being able to articulate exactly what that is.

And when it comes to that, I’m sure we will all agree that more than a little guidance is required to prevent the human race from finding new ways to harm itself.  As even primitive ape colonies appear to have hierarchies and moral codes to govern their members interaction,  it was likely in the interest of self-preservation that our ancestors came up with the idea to legitimize their tribal laws and institutions by invoking authorization from a higher source, e.g., a deity of sorts. This could be (at one time)  the sun-god Ra, the King of all Gods and mortals, or further varieties on that theme, unseen yet almighty entities with a supposed interest to keep us on the straight and narrow, and that we better do as we’re told, or else there would be hell to pay! And heaven would be our reward …

Enter religion – and until the eventual uncoupling of Church and State –  the self-proclaimed owners of whatever moral framework was seen as being necessary for a society to function with some degree of success towards a tenable future.  I know I have simplified this premise greatly, but it merely introduces the idea that religion is  about placing the seat of moral authority off-planet and hence beyond the ability to scrutinize it, question it or challenge it.

Of course, the problem was that not everyone one had the same idea about this, and so religious conflict was born. While this notion of  all-powerful metaphysical  beings helped to stabilize our species at the individual tribal level for certain periods of time,  it also appears to have been one of the main reasons for people to slaughter each other in order to establish the primacy of their particular brand of religious beliefs.

Regarding the latter, it is the nature of religious beliefs to be unsubstantiated, and examining them is like peeling an onion: after stripping layer after layer there is absolutely nothing at their core. Although some folks simply claim that they “know” that such beliefs are absolutely true – e.g., that a God exists – we can do little but take their word for it as they are unable to clarify what they mean by this assumption. This is at the core of every religious edifice – rationality has no place here – and as Nietzsche put it once  “Faith means not wanting to know the truth”.

Without a doubt religion has confused a lot of people into various stages of existential despair, the inevitable outcome of trying to believe in something that is entirely without substance regardless of what spiritual or ontological argument one wishes to root for it.  The attempt to make the leap of faith required in order to embrace some variety of eschatological mythology at the core of existence leaves one stranded at the dark abyss of irrationally because all reason must be abandoned beforehand.

Religion has no future, only a deadly present and a deadly past – it is the poisonous worm that, in the abandonment of reason, burrows itself deeply into the minds of those who find comfort in the kinds of beliefs that appear to let them off the hook for having to take any kind of responsibility for the moral character of our species, as this will have been decided “elsewhere”.  This reminds me of a line from a poem by Nietzsche’s favourite poet Holderlin which,  loosely translated from German, goes something like this: “While here on earth we mortals toil, elsewhere a God decides …”

Truly, in today’s language, God is vaporware, and at most an unsubstantiated rumour. But while the belief in imaginary entities might be deemed a juvenile condition by any other name, collectively our species should have grown out of this by now, and in the process have prepared the intellect to be immune from similar afflictions. This as we attempt to extract ourselves from the quagmire of religious superstition into a more enlightened future free from the self-denial featured by such beliefs. Hopefully we will then want to embrace the idea that we are accountable for our all our actions to ourselves only, and not to some entirely imaginary third party.

Not much you can do with an argument like that that – and I guess that is what the nature of religious faith is all about: acceptance without questioning. This is at the core of every religious train of thought – rationality has no place here  – and  as Nietzsche put it once: “Faith means not wanting to know the truth”

However, over the centuries people have attempted to put a rational basis to the foundation of religion, including the claim that God exists. The best known early attempt is perhaps the Ontological argument as presented by St. Anselm (1033-1109), and another version of it by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) – and represents the claim that God must necessarily exist because he is the greatest being imaginable.

One might think differently, but I can’t even begin to understand why this would have made any sense to anyone as it is clearly an unintelligible premise. But those were different times then.

Another and more sophisticated yet equally fallacious argument is the Argument from Design that has more recently surfaced as “Intelligent Design”. The world in all its complexity, so it is claimed, clearly shows evidence of having being designed by an advanced intelligence, therefore, it would be a reasonable hypothesis to assume the existence of a powerful being which possesses such intelligence, and that is God.

There is an attractive side to this line of reasoning given that  it is true that – despite man’s efforts to flush this planet down the toilet one way or the other in the pursuit of more money and power – the world, with all its perceived complexities, appears to work remarkably well, and it would be difficult to accept the premise that this is merely the product of random and accidental interaction between atoms and molecules over billions of years.

Well, at most one might be able to conclude that it is within the nature of the material world to reach the functional state of equilibrium as evidenced here on earth, but it would be an unsubstantiated logical leap to conclude from it that there is or are metaphysical beings of some kind out there that can be said to be the designers or creators of this phenomenon. That would be nothing less than concluding a cause from an effect, and nothing more than to commit the most basic of all logical fallacies, and hence an unproven assumption by any other name.

Now my theory is that God did not create man – and that in fact the opposite is true: man created God. As a result  – God – in a metaphorical sense, would indeed  have had belly button, since he sprang from the fertile mind of mankind – and today for those who still believe in him  the umbilical cord is still attached and keeping the idea of God alive a little bit longer.

And so man created God, together with all the other creatures that can be said to populate the metaphysical universe. He created God during the first dawn of reflective thought, when his mind became a mirror and he saw the world and himself in it; and when he did not know how or why he came about, or what his purpose in life was. And so he invented the idea of God – a parental creator and authority –  in response to the questions he could not find an answer for – like a soother in the mouth of babes – until such time he would come of age and has the courage to face his destiny on his own, and to accept full responsibility for it.

And this will happen, surely, when he is able to step back from his own ignorance with the realization that he isn’t the creature caught in the mirror,  but the actual source of it – that he is his own prime mover, and the embodiment of the force of life itself. That is: should we ever have the courage to open our eyes to consider and accept this.

 … It suggests that great discovery is the realization of something obvious; a presence staring us in the face, waiting until we open our eyes. (Michael Polanyi, in Science, Faith and Society)