@Cyracuz,
The reason Spinoza used the word 'God', I suspect, is because he was afraid of the Holy Inquisition in his time, even though he was a Jew.
Poor Baruch Spinoza. He was formally cursed and exiled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam where he had come of age. He was, after all, a heretic. Later on he was in difficulties with the Church and most of his writings were not published during his own lifetime. He was accused of being an atheist although he never claimed to be one. Theologically Spinoza was a few centuries ahead of his time. He uses the words ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ virtually interchangeably. For Spinoza, there can be no Creator which is separate from his creation. God (or Nature, if you will) is self-creating and eternal.
Causa sui, a cause of itself.
This almost echoes the Islamic dictum that God ‘does not beget and is not begotten.’ (Which, of course, makes nonsense of the notion that God somehow got Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, pregnant! But that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Now, the reason I use the word 'god' is because it's a very simple one-syllable three-letter word. It's a lot easier to say than, say, 'force of nature' or even simply 'the Force.'
In fact, it's easier to say than 'Yahweh' or 'Allah.' I see no objection to this word which is inoffensive to virtually everybody except virulently militant atheists who truly believe that Man is all there is. I've never said anywhere that I subscribe to anything like the silly caricatures in the Christian Bible.
It is my belief that there are very, very few actual atheists in the worl. Today there are any number of people who consider themselves to be atheists. It’s become quite fashionable, especially in Europe. But, in most cases, if one asks them what they mean by that, they’ll tell you that they don’t believe any of the nonsense in the Bible (including the Torah, or Old Testament) or the Quran or any other so-called ’holy’ tract. They’ll tell you that they think the priests, ministers, rabbis, imams and other clergy persons are deluded or insane or fraudulent con men. They may well be right, but that is not what the word ‘atheist’ means.
An atheist is one who denies the existence of any power or force which goes beyond human understanding. An unbeliever in the teachings of the religious is not necessarily an atheist.
When someone tells me that they do not believe in the existence of God, I always ask them to explain what they mean by ‘god.’ When they’ve explained what it is they do not believe in, I invariably have to agree with them. I don’t believe in any of that, either, except as an allegory or a metaphor. That is Aesop’s version of God.
But I do accept Spinoza’s and al-Kindi’s definitions of a deity.
The man we know as al-Kindi was an Arab philosopher living about 700 years before the time of Spinoza whose views on the nature of God seem to pre-figure the musings of Baruch Spinoza, although it’s not clear whether Spinoza had ever read any of the works of al-Kindi. Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (or Joseph Jacob son of Isaac al-Kindi, if you prefer an anglicized spelling) was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects in the first half of the 9th century C.E. In his best-known work, On First Philosophy, he states that God is simply “One” and, as such, cannot be described in any human language. He writes: “…the true One possesses no matter, form, quantity,
quality, or relation." (Emphasis mine.)
It would seem, then, that when a Muslim says, “
Bishmillahi ar rahman ar rahim,” -- “in the name of God, the clement, the merciful” -- the qualities of mercy and clemency that the speaker is attributing to God are in the nature of a metaphor. For al-Kindi God simply is. No such qualities as love or mercy or compassion can be ascribed to God. “It is…pure unity, nothing more than unity.”
If that sounds as though al-Kindi is contradicting the Quran, be sure that he knew it. He even had the temerity -- or courage, if you will -- to suggest that the Quran was created in time and, therefore, was not eternal but, in time, would cease to exist. I don’t know whether, 700 years later, Spinoza ever said anything similar about the Torah, but the concept is certainly implicit in his world-view.
This kind of non-conformist thought got al-Kindi into more trouble than Spinoza was ever to face. Caliph Mutawakkil of Baghdad, where al-Kindi was living, had him imprisoned and his library seized. But apparently al-Kindi had enough political and ecclesiastic connections to get himself cleared of charges of heresy and his books returned. He died about 10 years later, in 870, peacefully at home.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I am quite at peace with Spinoza's and al-Kindi's definitions of a supreme force.
