"God" is a concept with no substance behind it

There's several ways of believing in God.

I suspect that most people who profess a belief in God really mean "I believe in believing about God." Meaning, they really are unsure that God exists, but for a variety of reasons they consider that it's a good idea to believe in God, so they do it.

Some of those reasons could be: family pressure, cultural expectation, fear of death, benefit of being part of a religious community. 

The reason I say this is that looking back at the 35 years I spent as a believer, Eastern religion variety, I'm pretty sure I never actually believed in God. Instead, God was a hypothesis to me, a possibility not a certainty. Or even a high probability.

After all, if someone is committed to evidence, reason, and science (I sure am), it's very difficult, if not impossible, to combine those values with a belief in God. 

For there's no demonstrable evidence of God; there's no convincing reasons why God exists; there's no scientific method for confirming the existence of God. So while God can't be ruled out as possibly being part of reality -- nothing can -- God falls in the same category as fairies: a pleasant concept with no substance behind it.

In the February 12 and 19 issue of The New Yorker there's a review of a new book about Baruch Spinoza, who wrote in the 1600s about a conception of God that appealed to Albert Einstein in the 20th century. Einstein said:

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

But the references to "himself" in this quotation doesn't really fit with how Spinoza looked upon God. Here's some passages from The New Yorker article, "The Reticent Radical." (Online title: "Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times.")

At the center of Spinoza’s thought is a new way of understanding God. Indeed, his God was so different from the one worshipped in churches and synagogues that almost everyone who read him believed he was an atheist. But Spinoza indignantly rejected the charge of atheism, and nowhere in the “Ethics” does he deny the existence of God.

What he denies is that God exists as a being or intelligence separate from the rest of the universe, as he is conceived of in Judaism and Christianity. Spinoza’s argument is disconcertingly simple. God is “a being absolutely infinite,” and the idea of infinity “involves no negation”: it would be contradictory to say that there is some quality an infinite being does not possess or some space it does not occupy.

It is therefore impossible for God to be somewhere—up in Heaven, perhaps—but not here, where we are. If God exists, then he must be absolutely everywhere; not even our own bodies and minds can be separate from him. As Proposition XV of the “Ethics” famously states, “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”

This idea is known as pantheism, from the Greek for “all” and “God.” One way of looking at pantheism is that it brings us closer to God than conventional religious belief ever could; in the nineteenth century, Romantic writers considered Spinoza a “God-intoxicated man.”

But, if there is no difference or distance between God and the rest of the universe, then he cannot do any of the things that we ordinarily think of God as doing: hearing prayers, working miracles, creating the world with a “Let there be light.”

Really, there is no compelling reason to call Spinoza’s infinite substance God in the first place. We might as well call it Being, or Everything, or Nature. In Part IV of the “Ethics,” Spinoza refers to “the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature”—in Latin, Deus sive natura.

In closing the gap between humanity, God, and nature, Spinoza also does away with any space for free will. The infinite substance that is God appears to be constantly changing, yet always in accordance with what Spinoza calls “the necessity of his nature,” or what a scientist would call natural laws.

The ancient Greek engineer Archimedes said that with a lever and a place to stand he could move the Earth, but in Spinoza’s universe there is no place outside nature where we can stand in order to exert force on it, since we ourselves are part of nature.

Thus Spinoza essentially flipped the traditional conception of God completely around, but arrived at the same place in regard to God's existence.

For the traditional conception of God has no substance behind it, no reality, no actuality separate from the mind of the believer in "God."

And Spinoza's conception of God also has no substance behind it, no reality, no actuality separate from the mind of the believer in "God." For as the book review says, if God is viewed as everything in existence, then God doesn't exist as any sort of distinct entity.

How could everything contain a thing that is both everything and itself? If it's everything, it isn't a thing. If it is itself, it isn't everything.

So as the reviewer notes, there's no compelling reason to call Spinoza's infinite substance "God." Being, Everything, or Nature would do just fine. This seems to point to Spinoza as one of those who believe in believing in God, rather than holding an actual belief in God.

The article gives some reasons Spinoza would have done this. Notably, even though burning at the stake wasn't a punishment for heretics/atheists in the 1600's in the Netherlands, there was still significant risk if you were branded as a religious unbeliever.

Spinoza, knowing this, took the route of believing in a God who wasn't at all like the Judeo-Christian God, yet still was named in his writings as "God" even though there was no substance behind this name.

Comments

[um]

>>How could everything contain a thing that is both everything and itself? If it's everything, it isn't a thing. If it is itself, it isn't everything.<<

Whatever we know is an "variation of the same"

We are neither able to "see" the variation apart from its sameness
nor
are we able to see the sameness without its expression in a variation

We are not able to see the crow-ness of a crow, separate from this or that crow in our garden yet whatever we see and label as "crow" is nothing but its sameness.

Sameness and variation are not separate things they are at any moment inseparable.

Looking outside, whether as common people or as scientists, that riddle cannot be solved ...but mystics have found the door ...being "inside themselves" they have found the door,. That door bypasses the senses and the mind that "create" the "Variation" as it makes the sameness always seen as variations.

Once that is established the sameness of variations becomes vissible in ALL variable things ... and .. it should not be a surprise ... that sameness in all endless different variations is the same.

The foundation of it all is whatever you want to call it
energy, love, god

Obvious, based upon the testimony of humans all over the world and in all times, that can be experienced..

That experience is meaningless to those that do not have such an experience. To strive, after hearing from such and experience is also meaningless and useless waste of time in any effort to have such an "imagined" experience. ...but ... to be around with a person that has had such an experience, is a precious gift.

[um]

>> In this respect he [ Koerbach] also had even greater confidence in the powers of the human mind than, for example, Spinoza, Descartes or Hobbes.

Unlike Spinoza, he assumed that almost every person was susceptible to reason, that the common people could also be educated. While Spinoza was an outspoken elitist thinker who published exclusively in Latin because he was afraid that 'the rabble' would make off with ideas it could never really understand,

Koerbagh was a passionate optimist of progress and an outspoken egalitarian. That is why he saw it as his task to explain philosophical and religious matters in Dutch.<<

If something cannot be understood by the common people, one can wonder if it is worth to be understood at all.

[Appreciative Reader]

“I suspect that most people who profess a belief in God really mean "I believe in believing about God." Meaning, they really are unsure that God exists, but for a variety of reasons they consider that it's a good idea to believe in God, so they do it.”

I realize I’m commenting on an incidental portion of your post, Brian, that isn’t really to do with the main thrust of your discussion on Spinoza’s God. But still, when I read the quoted portion, here’s what occurred to me:

Sure, there’s many reasons why people (kind-of sort-of) believe in God. But one reason probably is because of a combination of two factors. One, the fact that most people lack either the time or else the inclination to delve too deep into the subject, and so imagine that they are not qualified really to independently hold a view on this. And two, an excess of diffidence, a sort of reverse-Dunning-Kruger, which again means that they don’t feel qualified to hold on to any independent view about God, except only very tentatively and without taking that personal opinion/view too far.

(They may privately think there’s no God. They may talk about it sometimes when drunk. They may discuss their suspicions when in a mellow mood, with guard down, with their girlfriend for instance. But given that most people haven’t really spent too much time researching this thing, or thinking this through, therefore they don’t trust their own opinion, even when their own common sense tells them this is all bullshytte plain and simple, at least not enough to do anything about it as far as their daily life. So they go on going through the motions of going to church or synagogue or temple or whatever.)

…At least that’s been my own anecdotal experience, what I’ve myself seen, of quite a few so-called theists.

[Looking]

@Um: "Looking outside, whether as common people or as scientists, that riddle cannot be solved ...but mystics have found the door ...being "inside themselves" they have found the door,. That door bypasses the senses and the mind that "create" the "Variation" as it makes the sameness always seen as variations.:

Would you please direct me to a mystic or scientist, I can visit to find the door.

[um]

@ looking

If I would know who you would love and who would love you ..I MIGHT consider it hahahaha ..maybe good coffee will help you

[Ron E.]

For quite a number of people over the decades, belief in a God or Gods, particularly among western countries, has declined and has been replaced to some extent by beliefs in various spiritual systems and in some cases, the guru or teacher has become almost a substitute for God where one attaches oneself to someone who perhaps claims to have realised.

In my opinion, an appropriate teaching would be a simple practice of meditation incorporating the invitation for the practitioner to enquire into his or her cognitive processes in order to experientially see how certain habits of thought have led to misapprehensions as to ‘who/what I am’. Such a practice could reveal how one has formed (and continues to form) a social, cultural or thought constructed identity whose raison d’etre is to maintain its illusory self-structure.

[um]

@ Ron E.

>> ...... whose raison d’etre is to maintain its illusory self-structure.<<

????

Is its raison d'etre any different that that of having a body, eyes, legs???

What about other creatures?
The farmers in our family, showing people around, will tell them that ALL cows are different; they all have an recognizable personality of their own.

Next time I will ask them if they can imagine a cow WITHOUT such a thing as what we call personality.

Obvious that personality is there for a reason, like legs and eyes. ..don't you think so?

[William J]

Hey Brian

Can God as placebo for whatever be substance enough?

[William J]

For Instance,

Capitalized "IN GOD WE TRUST" on the reverse of a United States twenty-dollar bill

[Ron E.]

Um. Yes, of course animals have what can be described as a personality; it is a recognised fact in primates and other mammals. And I would add that a mammal, a cow’s ‘personality’ is not there for a reason, it just is, naturally. A personality is natural and part of one’s physiology (animal or human) A self on the other hand is a mind created mental structure peculiar to humans.

What animals don’t have is the type of identity or self that is a construct formed from thought, ideas, opinions and beliefs. Unlike us, they do not have such a separate mind-made self – you should know this.

[Mica]

“God” is simply this: https://youtu.be/odZpToxOo8A?feature=shared
Nothing to be afraid of—nothing to fear. Guilt is the biggest lie.

[Mica]

We can SEE the world differently. It’s your choice.