Spinoza on Science and Stress

Richard Dawkins is not aware of it, but his latest book, The God Delusion, has driven the last nail into the coffin of Humanism. (1) By taking on the mantle of Nietzsche’s madman (God is dead), and making it respectful, Dawkins has destroyed forever the link between religion and science that Humanists forged. After Dawkins’critique, can any intelligent person use the word, ‘God,’ today, without feeling embarrassed? And yet we hang around the Best Seller lists, feeling a loss as the excesses of theism and anthropomorphism slowly drain any credibility from the deity. In reaction, some individuals fled east to the sound of one hand clapping. But it’s a shock to lose the word altogether.

Dawkins has given us Delusion as a handbook as to why we must reject the notion of a superhuman in the sky who justifies our baser emotions and actions. All right thinking people, owe Dawkins their thanks.

Some of the early Humanists, like Leibnitz, were guided by baser emotions while others were genuine believers in Theism. Still others simply tried to save their skins. All knew science had to supplant religion as a source of knowledge but they tried to hide this fact in mystical abstractions of human cognition (I think, I exist).

Shakespeare caught the transfer of transcendence from God to man by Humanists, with the words, ‘Man is the measure of all things.” Many scientists, including Dawkins, have been poisoned by this theism made flesh, ever since Humanists elevated human thinking to God-like proportions.

A thorough-going scientist who has magnified an appreciation of natural selection, I’m sure Dawkins would be mortified to realize his Humanistic assumptions have been conditioned by Theistic thinking. Theism is the enemy of science, whether it is in the hands of a religious dogmatist or a Humanistic apologist.

Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed how we play language games. In reply to a theistic question, Wittgenstein said that he did not play this language game. When Dawkins attacks the theistic use of the word, ‘God,’ and those who use it, as well as his definition of himself as an atheist, he illustrates that he is still caught up in religious language games. Since these games are one of the main threads of language, this is not surprising.

A recent cartoon by Don Piraro catches the result of Humanism’s influence on Dawkins (as well as the source of his delusion). The scene is heaven. God is staring at an information kiosk which shows an outline of the human brain with an x inside and the words, ‘You AreHere.’ God is saying, ‘Is this someone’s idea of a joke?’(2)

At the time Humanism developed, around Descartes’ Cogito (I think, I exist), another philosopher flirted briefly with Humanism, then left. His name was Baruch Spinoza and he described God *as the operative and generative cause in every single thing that exists. (3)

‘Operative’ is another word for logic and ‘generative’ for evolution. Spinoza struck a fatal blow to Theism when he says our universe, (nature), was never created but only generated. (4) But he also struck a blow to Humanism when he says that logic is not a creation of our brain (as Humanists assert), but the very fabric of the universe, (nature). (5)

Like George Boole would later rediscover in the nineteenth century, Spinoza also realized mathematics and logic are two expressions of the same subject. (6) Religious critics, using their language game, labeled Spinoza an atheist and tried to ban his writings. Humanist critics of Spinoza, used their theistically-soaked language to describe Spinoza as a ‘rationalist’ and a ‘pantheist.’ The Humanists have been more successful than the religious in muting Spinoza’s message.

Spinoza redefined God as the logical force that generates nature. This is a God of science, which is why Albert Einstein embraced this view. Dawkins wants to limit the use of the word, ‘God,’ to Theism, but Spinoza and Einstein expanded the concept.

The discussion on the use of the word, ‘God,’ might seem like just semantics if it was not for the important result which leads us beyond Dawkins’ delusion and illustrates why Alcoholics Anonymous has been so successful.

Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, realized that he and every other alcoholic needed a truth greater than themselves to combat this disease. At a crucial point, a friend handed him, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Influenced by the book, Bill avoided religious dogmatism when he was setting up AA and defined God merely as a ‘higher power.’ AA, which had been dangerously close to being sucked into secularism, instead became a source of help to individuals, no matter what their beliefs.

Spinoza redefined God for a specific purpose. Like Bill Wilson, he realized that he suffered from a deadly illness that affected both his body and mind. This was inadequate thinking which was being caused by circumstances of life and runaway emotions. Today we would call this, stress disease.

His first book states his clear purpose, that of, curing the intellect, (7) All of Spinoza’s major works are an expansion of this purpose and depend on his description of intellect’s two parts in this book - understanding and reason.

Spinoza said things of nature force their existence and essence (that which makes a thing what it is), on our passive understanding. We have a true idea that a thing exists and what it is. When I look at a park, I see existing things which I have learned to name: trees, grass, birds, squirrels. Even if I did not know their names, I would know they are different things that are really there.

Names start the second part of the intellect - reason. We begin the process of abstraction when we group of bunch of single things under one name, like ‘tree.’ Spinoza says the single thing is real but not the generalization. The pine is not the same as the maple, nor is it the same as the other pine.

Science, Spinoza says, collects single things together, examines what they are, how they are same and different and fit into the unity of nature. The process starts with the awareness of the single thing in our understanding, goes through the abstraction of reason and returns to the single thing with increased understanding.

Inadequate thinking occurs when things get caught in the abstraction of reason and do not return to the single thing in our understanding. The logician, W.V. Quine, calls this, ‘being caught in webs of belief.’ (8) Humanism is one of those webs.

Religion, Spinoza notes, has many of these inadequate concepts; sin, evil, good, bad, heaven, hell and the devil, are a few examples. No wonder the religious leaders did not like Spinoza. He probably only escaped being burned at the stake because he died before they could grab him.

Spinoza says,* “the more we understand singular things, the more we understand God.” (9) It is hard to twist our minds around Spinoza’s idea of God because we have been so soaked in an idea of God as exterior to us. Spinoza’s God only exists in single things and their unity in matter and thought. It is this union that has produced humankind’s use of the word, ‘God,’ in its many incarnations from totems and taboos to Theism.

As Spinoza says: “We consider it, therefore, impossible that God should make himself known to men by means of external signs. And we consider it to be unnecessary that it should happen through anything than the mere essence of God and the understanding of man; for as the understanding is that in us which must know God, and as it stands, in such immediate union with him, that it can neither be nor be understood without him, it is incontrovertibly evident from this that nothing can ever come into such close touch with the understanding as God himself can. It is also impossible to get to know God through something else.” (10)

Some feminist should have purged Spinoza from his use of the word, ‘him’ but as he tells us in the appendix to part one of the Ethics, he does not believe in an anthropomorphic God. Spinoza has taken away the idea of God in the flesh and instead, given the idea a logical form.

Dawkins is battling a fleshly use of the word, ‘God,’ while failing to recognize the evolution of the word to a logical expression because he is still caught in the wriggling web of Humanism. Dawkins still believes logic is a product of man’s mind and not the fabric of the universe. This is Dawkins’ delusion.

In the same year, Delusion was published, (and has deservedly ridden the Best Seller List since), another important book was published which has not been given the acclaim it deserves. Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, by Seth Lloyd. (11)

Lloyd describes the universe as a quantum computer and every single thing that exists, from the smallest particle of matter to the universe itself as operated and generated out of logic gates. This is a modern scientist’s seminal equivalent of Spinoza’s God Of Science. What Lloyd would describe as the universe programming all that exists from the simple to the complex, is the same as when Spinoza says “Now in the first place, we have said to God, no mode of thought can be ascribed except those which are in his creatures.” (12)

Dawkins’ delusion is the Huma nists belief that we program our thinking, rather than realizing everything that exists is programmed by the universe and everything that exists expresses the utterance that modern scientists are calling, ‘information theory.’

Like Spinoza and Einstein, we can call that phenomena, ‘God,’ if we want to! We should not call it atheism, as that is logically unsound.