In a Spinoza

For the past week or so Scott Adams has been winding up the atheist community with his posts about Pascal's Wager and unbelief. The cartoonist offers the following challenge to the self-professed atheist:

• You are either 100% certain there is no God, in which case you are irrational OR
• You think it most unlikely, in which case you are an agnostic with a political agenda.

I recently switched from atheist to infidel on my Facebook profile. None of these labels for unbelief have ever really felt comfortable to me.

• Atheist: too many associations with the Communist atheism of the twentieth century and the Protestant atheism of men like Richard Dawkins, both of which are tainted by materialism.
• Agnostic: More than a hint of limp-minded passivity...or worse still, proactive relativism.
• Humanist: includes men like John Colet, the founder of my school, and Erasmus, clearly both believers.

Scott Adams, a self-declared 'moist robot' appears to lean towards the apparent pantheism of Baruch Spinoza, whose conception of God as Nature appears highly compatible with a modern liberal-agnostic outlook. Perhaps Adams has read some Spinoza, perhaps not, but in truth the philosophical notions of this unfortunate exile and apostate look back towards the mystic traditions of Judaism and the wider currents of mysticism in medieval thinking (including Sufism and Neoplatonism) as much as they do towards the tenets of modern scientism.

Spinoza's God has both thought (mind) and extension (body), so to conceive of Him you do need to add something to the natural world as explored by Science − as we currently understand it at least. This divinity also has an important duality at the heart of his own being, which Spinoza labelled Natura Naturans, the unchanging aspect of God and Naturata which is the transient side. The more 'natural' if you like.

Compare for example Buddhism which seems to reject the idea that there is an eternal divine substance out there. (Meanwhile Spinoza's God has an infinite number of attributes and is really the only thing that can properly be said to exist.)

By all accounts Spinoza had a pretty crappy life, which is why some find it difficult to understand how he managed to draw so much solace from such an impersonal conception of God. It would appear though that thinking about this transcendent, mother-of-all dimensions where right and wrong and all other particular perspectives are compehensively reconciled, somehow allowed him to see his own tribulations as essentially trivial.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a long, dark epoch of unquestioned Faith replaced rather suddenly at some stage at the end of the fifteenth century by an embrionic form of the modern outlook. They were indeed a series of centuries when monotheism established its stranglehold on the Mediterranean world and beyond, but this was also a period where the pretensions of Faith and theology were in fact challenged on many different levels. (It was easier for our second Norman king William II 'Rufus' (1087-1100) to carry on like a practicing atheist and homosexual than it would be for any potential candidate for the US Presidency today.)

Science and Secularism ultimately became the most successful of these confrontations with Belief and they led the way to the industrialised West of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, they were so successful that a degree of idea-diversity was sacrificed along the way leaving our culture as vulnerable as a species with a contracted gene pool. And then, without that much help from religion, the rational-secular outlook tripped over its own feet at the start of the twentieth century, and has never really recovered its poise since.

Things are unquestionably worse now than they were when I was born in the late 60s. Then we grew up with a vision of the future (mostly rockets, moonbases and alien encounters, plus plenty of new gadgets like 3D TVs) which was fed by Hollywood and the wider entertainment industry. These days the only 'visionary' sci-fi on our screens consists of adaptations of Phillip K. Dick novels written twenty or thirty years ago under the influence of mind-mangling drugs. We have in effect collectively given up on progress, be it social or technological. You are born, try to become rich and/or famous, and die.

Many fragile cultural experiments emerged during the medieval period and regretably most were broken down one way or the other by the centralising powers of Church and State. Islands of comparative tolerance such as Moorish Spain eventually found themselves clamped between the theological extremes of militant Islam and Catholicism; Norman Sicily was assimilated, the sensual southern ways of the Languedoc brutally crushed. Nevertheless, the ascendancy of Church and State was finally curtailed by a new way of thinking that evolved from within these monolithic structures.

Spinoza's thinking reminds me of that lost learned diversity: those ideas from the medieval margins of Church and State that never quite made it. Our failure to extract him from his historical context in order to align him with secular scientific thinking can be explained in part by the tangled roots that ground him firmly in the medieval intellectual garden.

If looking forwards is no longer such an attractive option, and with all sorts of fundamentalisms already looking backwards gleefully, perhaps we infidels should at least consider the option of getting with the programme, and start to look around the edges of the supposed age of rigid faith for some discarded intellectual weapons with which to confront the crazies that are currently threatening our culturally-stalled modernity.