Q&A: Spinoza, Atheism, and Cause
Spinoza, Atheism, and Cause
Question
Hello Rabbi.
It is common to view Spinoza as “the atheist,” who presented a completely methodical metaphysical doctrine that leaves God out of the picture—if God is nature and nature is God, then the term God is emptied of any accepted meaning. But as I understand it, one of the things Spinoza did well was actually to solve his “problem of tzimtzum,” in that while tzimtzum deals with the question of how there can be a reality external to God while He is “the absolute One,” and solves it by saying that God “contracted Himself” (whatever that means), Spinoza simply argues that the problem begins with us—the divine and nature are identical, and thus nature is “the absolute One,” and anything that appears to us as non-uniformity stems from our lack of understanding. From Spinoza’s perspective, his goal is to transcend and intellectually grasp the unity of everything, until he understands it and no longer sees multiplicity in reality…
So the question that comes up is: isn’t Spinoza’s solution more logical and coherent than tzimtzum?
A second thing Spinoza does is define nature as the cause of itself (and from there he also starts calling it God), but really one could say that “the cause of itself” is identical to “without a cause,” since a cause by definition is something prior to a thing, whether temporally or causally, and logically it is also hard to say that something is prior to itself, since it itself already existed when it caused itself / at the “causal level” that caused it, etc.
From here, Spinoza opens the door to claiming that nature needs no cause at all, and the question is: does nature indeed require no cause? Even if we talk about the Big Bang and reject the eternity of the universe, it is hard to speak of a cause for the Bang itself, since everything began there—including the very concept of causality, whether temporal or causal—whereas everyone involved in philosophy and religion and attempts at reconciliation seems compelled to speak of a cause distinct from the universe itself…
I would be happy for a detailed answer, thank you very much, Rabbi
Answer
I have a simpler solution: there is no God. Now there is no problem of tzimtzum and everything is excellent. That is exactly Spinoza’s “solution.” The fact that they call nature God changes nothing. You could also call the chair next to you God. Spinoza is an atheist, since he too holds that there is nothing besides nature.
I elaborated on this in my book The First Existent. What is nature? The laws? Those do not cause anything; they only describe. Their legislator is the cause. And if they are entities, then they are God. And if nature is the objects in the universe, from our experience they are not self-caused.
Discussion on Answer
Correction: when he said that nature is God
I have no idea.
Anyone who is familiar with the Talmud and the work of the Savoraim, and at the same time knows the Mishnah and, to distinguish, the Persian religion in that period—the Persians ruled in Babylonia—finds some strange things. The Talmud is interwoven with Persian beliefs, such as the belief in seven firmaments, even though it is known that there are no heavens and no firmament at all, only atmosphere. There is no Ashmedai, Lilith, or harmful angels. And the differences between the Mishnah and the Talmud are in language, in interpretation, and in the adoption of festivals and the belief in the moon and the sun as a kind of gods. We are in 121; hasn’t the time come to adapt the Talmud to scientific knowledge?
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If the Rabbi could explain what Spinoza meant after all when he said there is no God, or was that really empty semantics from his point of view?