We see two apparently different strands making efforts to explain the universe. There is the scientific and the religious. Mainstream opinion tends to hold the view that science is the serious approach whilst religion just offers us an outdated idea dreamed up by superstitious and ignorant ancients.

Whilst agreeing the best route to an understanding of the world is a scientific one I am not so ready to dismiss ideas of the ancients as superstition or ignorance. As long as we are discussing human beings then we can be sure that those who left us ancient writings had every capability that we have in terms of rational thought. Also, with less distraction than modern life and I suspect a lot more time on their hands it could be argued that the ancients had plenty of opportunity to engage in philosophical speculation.

We can see great intellectual achievement in ancient history, the pyramids in Egypt or the plays, architecture and academic works of the Greeks. All of this was from a pre-Christian world the world of the Pagans. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato were Pagans and great thinkers too, yet for two thousand years the term ‘pagan’ has been used as an insult.

The time when Paganism was eradicated coincides with the time Christianity rose. The early years of Christianity were a time of terror. In the 3rd century AD. Roman Emperor Constantin decreed that Europe was to be unified under one religion and that religion was to be Christianity. Those who failed to practice the new religion were persecuted and most likely killed.

There was also great division within the new church between those who considered the ancient texts to be literally true and those who considered them to be metaphorically true. More killing ensued as the literalists wiped out all opposition to their views.

Since then those same texts have been subject to re-writing, translation and reinterpreting. It should be no surprise that such influential documents have also been subject to being rewritten and re-interpreted with political objectives in mind.

The first original God was a pantheist one. God and the universe were considered to be the same thing. Human beings on that scheme are a part of God. It is not difficult to speak of this God in a metaphoric way and claim that he is all powerful. All things, all power is God. If God and the universe are the same thing then God is clearly everywhere and in all things. If human beings are a part of God then God is all knowing… at least in the sense that all things that are known are by default God’s knowledge.

This pantheist description of reality was never intended to be an excuse for inventing some super powerful being. Rather it was a metaphoric aid for truly understanding the nature of our universe. Using a pantheist model is a perfectly rational explanation of the world.

The political class in the days of early Christianity used the ancient beliefs for their own ends and objectives. They took the metaphorical aids and used them in a literal way creating a theist God who could be used as a political tool. If God was all powerful He could do as He wished. If God was everywhere, He could watch what you were doing at all times. If He was all knowing He could even know what you were thinking. The Theist God was used to watch over the population, to monitor their thoughts and to dish out cruel punishments for all eternity to those who failed to follow the government line.

Charlatans and fraudsters still use veiled threats and promises of eternal joy in the afterlife to persuade others to engage in actions and to give up money. The Theist God still has its uses for those seeking social and political control or who are trying to get rich on the donations of others.

But people tend to need some spiritual comfort. Science presents a world to us which is cold, random, here by chance and which in some interpretations is cruel. We are told that we are little more than a bag of chemicals which give off blips of thought and after three score and ten years we go back to nothingness from where we, by chance, appeared. This is a poor representation of the facts. The materialist doctrine has long been discarded and its replacement physicalism, is vacuous as a philosophy and says nothing at all about the world. See Materialism and Physicalism for more details

The Rational God then is a scientific and philosophical book. It is wholly rational and it is about the idea of God. Further, it is a book which describes reality and all of science in one easy to understand basic scheme, placing our scientific knowledge into context.

TheRationalGod.com is going to be used for posts which are religious in nature or which deal with religion as a historical subject. Any scientific or metaphysical or philosophical issues will now appear on the new blog site, SpaceTimeInfinity.com Though the two strands of thinking are both seeking to explain existence, they do so in two very different ways. The search engines can now make sense of what typr of blog they are dealing with. This one is religious in nature, the other is scientific or philosophical. The book, The Rational God, is a scientific or philosophical book with important consequences for theological thinking.

I look forward to your company over the coming months.

Metaphysical monism is an ancient problem which still continues to this day, at least for some. A definition of monism can be framed quite succinctly; monism states that there is just one kind of thing that exists in the universe, everything is thus reducible to this one thing.

The earliest form of this problem was in ancient Greece. The Greeks had a scientific belief that the world was made up of earth, fire, air and water. What they attempted to understand was whether these four constituents of the universe were ultimate, or was there something more fundamental that underpinned or gave rise to them. They were asking, “Is the world made up of earth, fire, air and water or is the world made up of just one thing that can appear as earth, fire, air and water.”

From our modern post scientific perspective such a view can seem rather primitive. We know for example that the four primitive substances of the ancient Greeks are all reducible to molecules and atoms. We can continue the reduction to protons and neutrons and still further to quarks, or at least to quarks and electrons. The problem has been solved then, or at least the problem as the Greeks saw it has been solved. The debate concerning monism is still alive for some, though in a different format.

It was Descartes who postulated that the universe was made up of two different types of thing. He suggested that there are material things and mental things. The problem with a dualist account of the existence of things within the universe is this: How can two different entities with nothing in common interact? If they are distinct then they cannot share the same attributes and cannot therefore mix. If they cannot mix then one cannot be aware of the other. This is indeed a very serious problem for any dualistic account of nature.

Monism resolves the problem, in effect, by ignoring it. Monism claims that there is only one thing that exists in the universe and that thing is usually considered to be matter. There are other forms of monism but material monism is usually the default monism. By considering that only matter can exist, the monist is making the claim that all other phenomena are reducible to matter. Mind then, becomes nothing more than arrangements of matter with the mental being dependent on the material.

I shall be looking at the nature of monism and its consequences for our views of existence in more detail over the next series of posts.

When understanding Spinoza we discover that the most profound conclusion from his philosophy is to be found in Part I, Proposition XXIX.

‘In the nature of things nothing contingent is admitted, but all things are determined by the necessity of divine nature to exist and act in a certain way.’

There are a number of ideas and concepts wrapped up in this sentence and Spinoza’s philosophy is probably best explained by understanding what this one proposition entails. The first point to note is that Spinoza wants to make the assumption that all things are caused by other things. Basically there is a causal explanation for anything that exists. The one exception to this is the universe itself, which can only be self caused. There can only be one existing thing that is self caused, as was argued in the part 2 of Understanding Spinoza..

Now to say that a thing is determined is to say that the existence of a thing is caused by something else. In the case of inanimate objects such a position is without doubt. A table is caused by outside agents crafting the design; the table’s existence is fully determined by causes external to that table. With living and thinking creatures the certainty that all is externally caused is less obvious. We can say that I am determined by my parent’s acquaintance for example. My ideas and habits are caused by my past life experience. The events that have caused me to be how I am currently are outside of me. But can I then claim that I am free to make my own choices? Surely there is a case to state that my ability to be truly free depends on my past experience and that my education and training will determine my capability for truly free thinking.

But then we are accepting that freedom is again determined on past experience and that any free thinking is caused by agents outside of the thinker.

One way to fashion the question ‘whether I am free’ is to ask if I could have done some past act in a different way. Could I really have acted differently in identical circumstances? I made a choice given my assessment of those circumstances and acted accordingly. Just what would have caused me to behave in a different way given identical circumstances? Spinoza is clear in his view on this point:

‘In the nature of things nothing contingent is admitted, but all things are determined by the necessity of divine nature to exist and act in a certain way.’

Spinoza argues that nothing at all could be different than how things actually are. He even applies this idea to God or nature which he concluded are the same.

The one true existing free entity for Spinoza is God. But we have to be careful when we interpret exactly what Spinoza means by the term ‘free.’ For Spinoza, free in this context is to be free from being determined by outside agents. God or nature is not caused or determined by other things; rather God is self caused. God is not limited by outside agents; God is limited only by His own nature.

This is the most important difference between the pantheist God and the Theist God. The Theist God is assumed to have some kind of supernatural magic power which enables a magician like capability. The pantheist God has no such power. The pantheist God is restricted in His power by His own nature. He is not restricted by anything else, just Himself. The pantheist God is how He is because that is how He must be, determined by His own nature and by nothing else.

But a God who is determined by His own nature is a God with no will and no desire. God is how He is because it is in His nature to exist in that way. As Spinoza points out this is manifested in the way the universe is and how everything in the universe must be. Things are as they are because they could not exist in any other way.

If we consider Spinoza’s position we see that his claim is that there is one thing that exists. That one thing is God. Everything else is a part of, or an attribute of God. The universe and all things in it are God, or nature. Now atheists always state at this point in the discussion, why bother calling the universe God? Why not just call the universe the universe?

The fundamental reason for Spinoza is that if things could be no other way, then the universe has to exist in the way that it does. If the universe could not exist in any other way and is here as a result of self creation followed by a causal chain of events, then our existence is intimately wrapped up in the first cause itself. The universe at its core or essence necessarily contains thinking things (us) and has to contain thinking things because that is how the universe is. Spinoza was so convinced that this was the true nature of the universe that he argued any resistance to the idea was based on a refusal to think clearly or an unwillingness to attend to the necessary definitions.

For me, the idea of God and the universe being the same is a strong and valid metaphor. Any enquiry into understanding the world in which we live will require using ideas with which we are familiar in order to explain more complex ideas. Using the metaphor of God helps to emphasise the necessary nature of our existence and the intimate conjunction with the universe that we have. These ideas are some of the oldest explanations of existence that there are and predate theism by many centuries.

The concepts and definitions which can be applied to the pantheist God are the same as those used with the theist God, but are coherent and consistent. For example, to claim that God is omnipotent is to state that all power (think all energy) belongs to God. All things that exist are attributes of God. There is no thing outside of God. Similarly omnipresence; God is everywhere because all things are attributes of God. The concepts that theists wish to apply to their God but cannot, because they fall into contradiction, can be quite readily applied to the pantheist metaphor without contradiction. But of course the theist God evolved as a political tool. An all seeing, all knowing, eager to punish God of Big Brother Theism has been utilised for political control rather than as a means to knowledge and understanding. In understanding Spinoza we note that the pantheist God has existed only as a conclusion of rational enquiry.

This post is to develop further towards understanding Spinoza’s metaphysics and to look at the crucial ideas he raises. Spinoza’s main work, The Ethics, in effect introduces a set of definitions and elucidations of each of the fundamental notions of substance, cause, attribute, freedom and necessity, explaining each in terms of the others. When Spinoza has defined these logically connected notions he defines what it is he means by God or nature.

An important point is that Spinoza does not present his definitions as one arbitrary set of alternative possible definitions. Rather he insists that to conceive the world in any other way than this is to be involved in contradiction, or to be using words without any clear meaning attached to them. It is the interconnectedness of Spinoza’s definitions that gives force to his position.

In understanding the universe the notion of substance is a good place to start. What actually exists? The story of understanding the world can be viewed as one which is attempting to answer this one question. In answering the ‘what exists?’ challenge we have to unravel the world into those things that exist by necessity and those things that exist as modifications or attributes of necessity. In stripping substance down to its fundamental and necessary components we can get a true understanding of reality. Those things that exist but are not fundamental are attributes of substance.

Descartes explained this very well with his lump of wax. He asked ‘what are the fundamental characteristics of the wax?’ and he decided that it was essentially the fact that it existed in three dimensions – or had extension. Wax, as a solid lump is white and solid. In moving the wax towards a heat source we notice that the wax turns into a liquid and becomes transparent. The essential characteristic of the wax, that it exists in three dimensions, remains. The attributes of the wax, its colour and solidity however change.

When Spinoza applied the idea of substance to the world as a whole he realised that there are some definite ideas we are forced to conclude. For example, any substance has to be the cause of itself. If a substance were caused by some other substance then the two substances would have characteristics which were the same. There would be something more fundamental underpinning the two different things. Anything we identify as a fundamental substance therefore must be explainable only through reference to itself and to no other thing. If there are two substances, then neither can be the cause of the other, each must cause itself and they must not contain any attributes which are the same. Two different substances have to be independent from each other, have nothing in common and not be the cause of each other.

Now any rational understanding of the universe is undertaken by an examination of causation. Rational explanation is explaining those causes. To abandon an investigation of causes is to abandon all hope of knowledge. If there are two substances which co-exist and which are completely independent of each other we would have to ask just how can two independent things coexist that are separate. Both substances would have to be causes of themselves and to have two such substances would be impossible. There can be only one self caused entity and that entity gives rise to all else that exists.

Now we can apply the consequences of this argument in a few different ways. First of all how we interpret the ontology (what things exist?) of the universe and secondly how we view the notion of God as a creator.

Theists argue that God and the universe are two separate entities. But if the universe is a consequence of God’s necessary existence, ie: if God created the universe then the universe and God must have some characteristics in common. The universe must be an attribute of God’s existence. God and the universe could not be made of two distinct substances. If God causes the universe then they must have some attributes in common. This is a denial of theism as defined because God and the universe cannot be two separate things. A Deist account or a pantheist account can sidestep this argument but a theist account cannot.

Spinoza drove home this position very strongly by describing how theists approach their discussions and descriptions of God. He had a clear and logical description which associated the idea of nature precisely with God or the one true substance. He argued that it is the association of anthropomorphic and personal imagery which obstructs reason in the logical necessity of this identification. When we dissociate the word “God” from all of these figurative descriptions and no longer picture the deity as a person, then mere logic forces us to recognize that God and nature are precisely the same.

As Theists have insisted on making a distinction between God the creator and His creation, so they are constantly forced into contradiction. Imagining God as some super-person, with a will and purpose can only lead to logical difficulty. The perennial contradictions and controversies eg: the problem of evil, of God’s freedom of choice and His reasons for choosing the actual world in preference to other possible worlds.

There are more clear logical arguments which seriously refute the theist position. In having a creator God and a separate creation the all powerful nature of God is contradicted. God’s eternal existence is also demolished if He set the universe up and then stood back.

There are however some very important consequences and surprising conclusions if we accept Spinoza’s arguments. Toward the aim of understanding Spinoza further I shall deal with these in the next post.