Ethics

Description

Spinoza's God is totally bound by His own immutable laws, which are the laws of Nature.

"Ethics spells out the essence of Spinoza's philosophical system. It is doctrine that everything in the universe - Nature writ large - inheres in a single, perfect "Substance." This infinite and eternal Substance is what Spinoza calls "God, or Nature." It alone is self-caused, absolutely determined and not contingent on the existence of any other thing. Spinoza's God is perfectly, radically immanent within Nature.

In this system, there is no room for a transcendent spiritual God who willfully created the physical universe and who stands outside it as its master; communicates with prophets; chooses His favorite nations and individuals; judges, rewards and punishes His creatures at will - or performs miracles. Instead, This conception robs the traditional deity of autonomy and strips Him of all the anthropomorphic, moral and psychological attributes through which He had always been conceived in traditional monotheistic faiths." -Allen Nadler, The Forward.