The comment bag: responding to the response citing Spinoza

I'm always pleasantly surprised to check my site-meter and find out people do visit this little blog.

And I'm thrilled to receive comments. Am not thrilled by the SPAMMER comments. I try to delete those as soon as I find them. If I missed any, please let me know!

But it is great to receive real comments. And I was happy to see that someone from Finland left some thoughts on this blog post.

I'll reproduce it here below:

Spinoza has said that even a stone, if it would have consciousness, would think it is it's own choice to fall down when it is dropped. Same way we people think we choose to drop the stone, but it is just actually law of physics or God if you may (I actually think of them as the same thing - nature and God).

I'm a molecular biologist not a philosopher so I'm not up on my Spinoza.

So I went to my one volume encyclopedia to check out Spinoza. It said that Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher. He didn't accept the concept of free will but believed human actions are driven by self-preservation. He thought that mind and body, ideas and the physical universe were just different aspects of the same substance he called god and nature interchangeably.

This sounds like pantheism?

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity described it this way:

Patheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God.

What is the consequence of a pantheistic view of the world? Lewis said this:

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some things we see in it is contrary to His will.

One current pop culture manifestation of pantheism is well illustrated by the Star Wars films. The Force is in everything. It is kind of romantic to think about god in everything. You see a babbling happy baby and you see god. You smell the flowers and there is god. You hear the chirping of birds and that's god too.

But with that view, what else is god?

Don't mean to be crude ... but the axe-murderer is god if god is in everything. The only way to avoid that consequence is to put god apart from the physical universe. Lewis explained:

They (Christians) think God invented and made the universe -- like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed.

What do you think?

Thanks for dropping by this blog and feel free to leave comments. I do enjoy them. I aim to be hospitable. I hope we can all think things through together in a fair minded way and reach some clarity whether in the end we agree or not.