Nature is God

Returning to the book I mentioned previously. A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton. For the most part it is a brief introduction to various philosophers throughout history and their thoughts on existence and God, perception and reality.

Most philosophy books I’ve read in the past have been political in nature. Questions about who gets what and says who?

For this reason, famous ideas about God and the like have mostly past me by. For example, I’d read a little about David Hume but had never read his thoughts on his death.

That he had no hope he would survive death and that he was no more worried about the time after his death than he was about the time he had not existed before his birth.

The lens grinder

The book has a chapter on a philosopher I don’t recall reading about before, Baruch Spinoza.

It introduces his reasoning that given god is thought to be infinite then everything is God and God is everything. All parts of a complex whole.

He argued that the anthropomorphism of God, as an entity who listens to, and responds to prayers with qualities of love and empathy was illogical.

That you can, and perhaps even should, love this God but you shouldn’t expect anything in return in the same way that you can love nature. That God was indifferent to the plight of men, just as nature was, because God was nature and nature was God.

These few pages have piqued my interest and I will endeavour to find out more about his ideas, hopefully I can find a book aimed at my reading level. That is always the challenge with these things.