Spinoza: Is Reason the end of miracles?

When my Hermeneutics class started looking at things through the lens of Spinoza, I had to put my foot down.

All these years later, I’m still not sure I know exactly what Spinoza’s overarching point was. I know he was brilliant, a member of a family of Sephardic Jews from Spain who made their way to Amsterdam in the 1600s. I know that as a philosopher, he managed to get himself excommunicated from both the Catholic church and from Judaism for his radical ideas—who even knew that one could be excommunicated from Judaism?

I know that his “Theologico-Political Treatise,” which I covered margin-to-margin in angry rebuttals scribbled in blue ballpoint, began with a warning to anyone other than the “Philosophical Reader” to whom it was written:

To the rest of mankind I care not to commend my treatise, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them: I know how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion; I am aware that in the mind of the masses superstition is no less deeply rooted than fear; I recognize that their constancy is mere obstinancy, and that they are led to praise or blame by impulse rather than reason. Therefore the multitude, I ask not to read my book: nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont. They would gain no good themselves, and might prove a stumbling-block to others, whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to Theology, and whom I seek in this work especially to benefit.

Perhaps I should have heeded this warning before I dived in. I was indeed one of those people who placed Theology on a higher shelf than Reason, and for whom a book like this could definitely be a stumbling-block.

The reason that this book is so dangerous? Because Spinoza is so honest.

Destroying God to find God

The thinking that got him in trouble with every church and synagogue, and with many others who read it, is thinking that he had to follow through to its very logical conclusion, even if it was to destroy the very concept of God that they held so dearly.

While Spinoza never denied the existence of a God, he sliced right through the moody anthropomorphic God of the Hebrew Bible, with his claims that God had to be immutable—unchanging—and not subject to our human emotions.

“But what if God wanted to be emotional,” I complained. “What if he allowed himself to be that way?” It was easy to knock down God in a logical argument if we were the ones making the rules.

Where Spinoza was going was Pantheism, or perhaps even Panentheism, in which God is not a separate, man-like creator and sustainer being who attends to our prayers and accepts our worship, but a God who—or which—is essentially the same as the universe.

In Pantheism, God is basically reality itself, all powerful, perhaps all knowing, not necessarily all good (unless one says that everything that happens is good—regardless of the value we humans place on it—simply because it was caused by the universe, which is synonymous with God.)

PanENtheism goes even further, to say that God is greater than the universe, not as a separate being, but as “all of everything,” including the universe.

One thing I do know is that Panentheism is at least greater than my imagination.

But I also know that I have very little interest in a God who is simply not a who, but is infused in everything, just operating by natural laws and doing everyday things. True or not, I don’t want a God who is a mountain or a tree. I want a God who can move the mountain, or who can cause the tree to burst into flame and spew out prophecy.

I want a God of miracles.

A God too perfect for miracles

And when Hermeneutics class came down to the subject of miracles, I had finally had enough.

Miracles, Spinoza theorizes, are impossible. If God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good (at least good in that the things that are necessary in the universe happen), then God would have created all of the natural laws that God needed to create in the beginning of the universe—knowing all of the possibilities and contingencies in the future.

Therefore, God would not need to interfere with God’s perfect, unchanging, laws, which were prepared for everything. God would not need to intervene to divide the Red Sea—if a way across were needed, perhaps God would have already made sure there was a bridge there, or that the sea was shallow enough that season to wade safely across.

God would not need to heal you—if God wanted you to be well, God would have empowered your immune system to keep you well in the first place. God would not need to stop your car accident—momentum and friction would have been fine-tuned at the beginning of the universe in such a way that the accident wasn’t a risk in the first place (that is, if God didn’t want that accident to happen—if God did want it to happen, then everything was engineered perfectly).

In his day-to-day life, Spinoza was a lens-maker. I am tempted to describe his universe as the universe of a lens-maker, in which God created a monolithic universe—or was a monolithic universe—and life simply poured through it, the way light poured through a lens, refracting and bending in the way it was designed, and in that way only.

But I knew that there were miracles. My very life depended on one. And I had seen and heard of so many others. In fact, the belief system that was the foundation of my entire world-view—universe-view—relied upon a very specific miracle that happened to a single 33-year old son of a carpenter some 2,000 years ago on a lonely hill in the Middle East.

I wasn’t buying it.

The need for miracles

After first hearing Spinoza’s argument against miracles, class after class I kept coming in with new objections to his argument. I started thinking about the things I had learned during my adventures with the Charismatics. For them, the magic word was Faith. Faith was what made the universe operate. In particular, Faith was driven by the spoken Word.

In Genesis, the universe was created by a spoken Word (which the Gospel of John later associates with Jesus Christ himself, present before the creation.)

Throughout history, miracles occurred because of the spoken Word, with people asking God for that which they wanted or needed, or by declaring things to be so. The formula “Say unto this ___ be ____, and it was so,” comes to mind. Staffs turn into snakes. Water into blood. The lame walk. Altar sacrifices are consumed with fire. The water divides so people can walk through.

One of my favorite miracle stories is the one in which an army in the Hebrew Bible is beset by 3 different armies on all sides, and God tells them not to fight, but to send their best singers to the front lines. The singers go, and sing praises to God. The enemy armies become confused and kill each other. The power was in the words of the singers.

I thought about the scripture used as currency in the Charismatic church—believe it to be so when you pray, and it will be so. “Name it and claim it, “ they say. Speak things into being.

Yet, I also knew that miracles didn’t just happen on a whim. Even though Jesus said that with the faith of a mustard seed, I could throw a mountain into the sea, I knew that I couldn’t do that just to show off for my friends, or impress a girl. I know that Peter was able to walk on water when Jesus told him to, but I knew, from my experience at my Dad’s pond, that I couldn’t just walk on water—even if I believed I could—to prove to myself that God was powerful enough to do it.

I had the wet shoes to prove it.

There had to be a need.

When people were sick, God would be there to heal (except when he wasn’t—but that’s for another post about theodicity, or why God allows bad things to happen.)

When people were poor, God was there to provide for them.

When people were in danger, God was mighty to save.

So I brought this idea to class. I brought a magic word of my own.

Necessity.

Destroying miracles to save them

“What if Spinoza is right,” I proposed. “What if there really are no miracles, at least in the sense that Spinoza described them. What if he’s right, that God did create the universe and its laws perfectly at the beginning of the universe.

“However, what if God also realized that the general laws that God created were not going to cover each contingency exactly. So what if he built into them some other intricate little natural laws that we are not yet aware of, scientifically, but that we have in some sense always known from the beginning of the universe.”

“Keep going,” my professor said.

“So, in the way that weird things happen when you start taking matter and accelerating it toward the speed of light, what if the laws of physics and causality start to bend a little bit when there is a certain combination of Necessity and Faith?

“Say you have a bunch of kids flying down the road in Mom’s station wagon, drinking beers and not thinking about what they’re doing, and you have Mom at home, praying that they will be safe. Then there’s that train coming toward the railroad crossing up ahead, with no idea of the danger it’s running into.

“So you have necessity—the kids are in danger. And you have faith—Mom’s praying. And you have what should be an unavoidable collision. But somehow, something happens—something that normal physics can’t account for. The car blows a tire and spins safely to a stop a few feet from the crossing. The train has a mechanical problem and slows down enough that the kids can cross in front of it before it comes to the crossing. Or—even weirder—somehow the car seems to just pass through the front of the train, when everybody—the kids, the conductor, the people watching horrified from their cars—all knew this should have been a disaster.

“We’ve all been there, that scene where we know we should have been dead, and have no idea how it happened otherwise. Well, maybe there’s some underlying law underneath all that. If so, I choose to call that a miracle.”

“Well,” my professor said. “Keep working on that. There’s something there worth exploring.”

Although she didn’t let on which part. That would be for me to figure out, and I’m honestly still working on it.

At the end of the semester, after all the arguments had cooled down, the professor was sweet enough to have her students over to her nearby apartment for a little party.

There were crackers and cheese and charcuterie and glasses of wine. We had little readings from favorite philosophers, listened to classical music, generally avoided argument, and enjoyed one another’s company on a winter night.

Late in the evening, I helped my professor to the kitchen with a tray full of glasses. I knew I had been a holy terror and a pain in the butt all semester, so I thought it was the least I could do.

As I placed the tray down on the counter, I turned to go, but she stopped me with a glance of her sparkling eyes.

“I want to tell you something,” she whispered.

I leaned in, a little surprised, wondering what she was possibly going to say next.

Looking me straight in the eyes, she said, “Don’t tell anybody, but I believe in miracles, too.”

She smiled a mischievous smile and went back to the party, leaving me to stand in the kitchen and wonder.