Spinoza's god
'The Jews cannot have been God’s chosen,' the philosopher dared write. No wonder the rabbis threw him out of the synagogue.
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Next week: The Rape of Eve
NOT LONG AGO A FRIEND asked me whether I believed in God.
Her question implied that she and I shared an idea of a god in whose existence we were able to believe – or not.
I replied that my mind is inadequate to the task; my imagination falls short. Even if I were able to conceive of a god in whom I might believe, did her question mean the gods of the Aztecs, the gods of the Cherokee, the gods of the ancient Greeks, or the god of the Protestants, Jews, Catholics and Muslims?
Had my friend been a militant atheist, a similar problem arises, at least philosophically: those who say they disbelieve in ‘God’ implicitly recognise the possibility that He (or She or They or It) exists, at least for so…