LISTEN (recorded Sep.2020). In Environmental Ethics today we finish Hope Jahren's Story of More, after first turning to Spinoza in CoPhi.
Jahren's last lines, in her Acknowledgements, have me thinking she may just be a Spinozist. She thanks the anonymous graffiti-ist who inscribed our species' indictment for excessive energy consumption on "the electrical box at the corner of Blindernveien and Apelveien with: 'We worship an invisible god and slaughter a visible nature--without realizing that this nature we slaughter is the invisible god we worship.' It got me to thinking," she concludes... (continues)
“The word ‘God’ is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses; the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends...” Einstein does not refer here to God as a cosmic designer. Rather, he expresses his lifelong disbelief in a personal god—one that controls the lives of individuals. In 1929 Rabbi Herbert Goldstein sent him a telegram asking “Do you believe in God?” In response Einstein made an even clearer distinction between the awe humans feel when faced with the vastness, complexity and harmony of nature, and the belief in a god that monitors ethical behavior and punishes the wicked. He admired the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and wrote: “I believe in Spinoza’s god, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” SciAm
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