Enlightenment
Baruch Spinoza believed that humans' actions and activities are not based on free will, but rather humans are moved to action and thought because he believed that nothing happens by mere chance. His rationale for believing as he does is the basis for this essay.
Free Will vs. Determinism
A review of what Spinoza believed is not the easiest thing to accomplish since some of what Spinoza puts forward is seemingly esoteric to the lay person or student engaged in research. But in researching Spinoza's philosophy, looking carefully at his positions, one can come to understand basically why he did not believe in free will. He believed that God, and God alone, is free to make decisions and to act according to His free will. Since God is Nature, and Nature is God, and therefore everything that exists on Earth are there because God decided, of His own free will and power, to create those things.
Because everything in Nature has been done through God's free will (that would include humans), which are but an extension of God's of choice, Spinoza explained. Will, in other words, is just a way of thinking, and because humans are gifted with intellect, they believe they are making intelligent choices but in fact their choices are determined in advance by their conditioning.
Divine nature, which God has created, has provided the necessity for humans to act in certain ways; they do not have the luxury of deciding what they will do and when they will do it, Spinoza explained.
The…
but, these entities should normally have equal power. If good encloses evil, this means that good is more powerful than evil. In addition one may wonder if it God's choice to allow evil to continue existing. The answer is no. According to Spinoza everything which exists derives from the very existence of the absolute substance, God, independently from his will. This puts an equality sign between God and nature. The
After all, if there is an infinite God, then it becomes easy to assume that he is an all-powerful God. If there is an all-powerful God, it is difficult to argue against the idea that he controls every action, which would be an argument in favor of final causation. Spinoza's challenge to the idea of final causation and even an argument against the idea of something like predestination comes
Theism or Atheism? When humans consider the existence of God, they tend to look outward for evidence and inward for understanding. Humans must process both types of information through a filter that is based on an unwarranted confidence in human reasoning. Or, failing that, humans must fall back to rely on faith. The nature of faith may perhaps be characterized by an absence of definitive criteria other than the absolutes that
As a result, each substance can have multiple attributes. In fact, an entity with an infinite essence will, by definition, have infinite attributes. Spinoza builds upon the idea of an infinite God by going further and stating that absolutely infinite substance is indivisible. This is because, if it were divisible, and if each part would retain the nature of the infinite substance, which would result in there being more than
Rationalist Philosophers Descartes: Explain one of Descartes' arguments in Meditation VI for substance dualism. Critically discuss one possible objection to the argument. Descartes was not a nihilist or solipsist who truly doubted the existence of anything outside his own mind, and only used skepticism to arrive at clear and distinct ideas. He has already proved his own existence as a thinking being, and that God exists, along with his physical body and objects
' Religion is belief in the existence of a supreme being while science is a study to explain the how. The main conflict of these two disciplines begins with the concept of life. Religion explains that God is the creator and giver of life, whereas scientists argue that life evolved from a microorganism. The debate between religion and science is highly controversial but I choose to take the stand of the
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