In 1992, a prisoner tried to stick a shiv in my gut. I caught the thrust with my hand. The cut, while superficial, went deep into my soul. The adrenalin addiction I had acquired as a guard, became Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I lost my faith in life. It was not till I discovered Baruch Spinoza’s God Of Science that I found the way to recovery. By the 17th century, a new description of God was emerging from the womb of human understanding. This was the God Of Science. The church did its best to make this a still birth. However, early fathers of Humanism sneaked a bastard version out of the midwife’s hands.
This baby grew into an adult with an Oedipus complex. God the Father, an anthropomorphic spawn of Mesopotamia, that troubled area we now call Iran and Iraq, had been split into the hydra heads of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This God ruled as the King of Religion. This was a king of jealousy and wrath. No wanted to incur his displeasure. Especially since economic and political well-being, even life itself depended on being on the right side of this king. The early fathers of Humanism saw the wrath of the church fall on Galileo and Bruno. Whether they were prudent, like Descartes or ambitious like Leibniz, they tried to wed the infant bastard, science to an other-worldly notion of God the Father. This poor bastard was never legitimate, though there are still individuals today who try to couple the natural and the transcendental. The bastard idea bided its time and nursed its resentments until it was time to kill the father. As books like The God Delusion. on the best-seller lists, indicate, now is the time. A Jewish scholar, Baruch Spinoza, danced briefly with the fathers of Humanism but then went his own way to discover the God of Science. He had already been excommunicated from the Jewish faith along with any contact with people from that faith due to ideas of God he had drawn from Euclid, the ancient Greek father of geometry. Spinoza’s method of thinking and the axioms as foundations of that thinking is derived from Euclid’s Elements. It is not an intellectual stretch to suggest that both Spinoza’s model of ethical human behaviour and his conception of God were foreshadowed in Euclid’s Common Notions. (The 13 Books Of Euclid’s Elements, 2nd Ed. Dover, 1956) Aristotle called the common notions,’reason dwelling in the soul.’ The first 4 common notions deal with that glue which enables mathematics and ethics to work: equality. The 5th common notion: ‘The whole is greater than the part,’ led to the concept that ultimately defined the God of Science as ‘substance of reality.’ Unlike some philosophers, Spinoza believed philosophy should be practical. So he began with a practical problem that was somewhat exacerbated by his circumstances. He was kicked out of the Jewish congregation, losing his ability to work any longer in his father’s business because Jews were forbidden to associate with him. Spinoza asked what was, ‘The supreme good of life?’ If it was wealth, Spinoza was out of luck. The fame he was achieving was not that positive, considering someone tried to kill him for his ideas. Although he liked his beer and his pipe, Spinoza was not big on indulging himself for pleasure.So when he examined wealth, fame and pleasure as goals, Spinoza had some experience in the practical possibility of their failure.Finally Spinoza decided the supreme good we can seek, that will not fail us, is…’the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature.’The God of Science was identified as operating by the same rules of logic as nature, or, as we would probably call it today, the universe. God or nature is the same wholeness out of which we think and experience life. This is what Spinoza meant by substance.Having identified God with nature and alienated himself forever from the established faith, Spinoza went one step further. He broke from establishment philosophy, from the past to the present, by denying man’s reason as the source of truth. For Spinoza, logic is not an invention of man but is embedded in the fabric of nature: “Since, then, Reason has no power to lead us to the attainment of our well-being, it remains for us to inquire whether we can attain it through the fourth and last king of knowledge. Now we have said that this kind of knowledge does not result from something else but from a direct revelation of the object itself to the understanding.’ (Spinoza: Complete works, trans Samuel Shirley, Hackett, 2002) Modern scientists since Gödel and Heisenberg have discovered this fact about human reason. Because of this, Humanists who make our thinking the measure of all things are as upset with science as they once were with Spinoza. Because Spinoza identifies God with Nature, he denies that God is a transcendent Father In The Sky. Spinoza sees all anthropomorphic identification as a conceptual error that has led humankind into dark ignorance. Spinoza’s ideas made him enemies in all the religions of his day, but he had an even more dangerous and subtle group of enemies in the Humanists, who had spawned their bastard version of the God of Science. Religious enthusiasts wanted to destroy Spinoza’s works, but the Humanists perverted his ideas and tried to destroy his soul. They misidentified him as a ‘Rationalist’ and labeled his earlier works, the place where he developed the foundation of his thinking, as ‘immature,’ and therefore unimportant. In 1673, Spinoza was on his way to the Hague to publish his most famous work, The Ethics, when he discovered two sets of enemies lay in wait for him. He turned back. The Ethics had to be published by his friends in secret, after his death. Ultimately, all the Calvinists and Catholics, his immediate religious foes, could do to Spinoza, was to ban his books and put them on the church index of banned books. But the Humanists, who were identified at that time as Cartesians, have been more effective. Now Spinoza’s God of Science has been almost completely eclipsed in misinterpretation. This was no conspiracy plot. Spinoza’s Idea of God and human nature was so radical that his words really did not make sense until our present century. The discoveries that enhance their understanding are being made by science, not religion or philosophy. Spinoza’s enemies did not understand what he meant by the nature of God and man. For Spinoza, God is the perfect unity of all the individual things that exist. Each human being is one part, or in computer language, one bit, as is everything else in the universe We know our connection to this unity in two ways; 1) we have a body 2) we think. Like everything else in the universe, our thinking and our bodies are only different expressions of the same substance. The Humanists separate body from thinking. Spinoza didn’t.God is an extended and thinking substance for Spinoza. Until recently, most scientists would have accepted the concept of extended but been skeptical of the thinking description. Now however, some scientists think every particle in the universe receives and sends out information.As the scientist, Seth Lloyd says: ‘The universe is made of bits . Every molecule, atom and elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction between those pieces of the universe processes that information by altering those bits. That is, the universe computes and because the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits. The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.” (Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, Vintage Books, 2007)
Modern science has a new name for Spinoza’s attributes of God.
The first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) is extension.
The second law of thermodynamics (expansion of information), is thought. Lloyd explores these attributes.
Science has caught up with Spinoza’s idea of the God of Science.