Spinoza’s God: a convenient deity

"Perhaps the most famous self-proclaimed disciple of Spinoza in the twentieth century was Einstein, who, when asked by a rabbi whether or not he believed in God, replied, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men." Einstein was probably just being diplomatic when he answered the rabbi. Spinoza's God is, after all, a convenient deity for those who might more accurately be described as non-religious. The "religion" of Spinozism is in fact rather close to modern secularism. It insists that morality has nothing to do with the commands of a supremely powerful being, and that it does not require a priesthood or the threat of an unpleasant afterlife to sustain it. It rejects the idea of a personal God who created, cares about and occasionally even tinkers with the world. It dismisses the notion of the supernatural, and regards religious ceremonies as merely comforting or inspiring, if you like that sort of thing. It advocates freedom of thought in religious matters... And it places its faith in knowledge and understanding—rather than in faith itself—both to improve the circumstances of human life and to make that life more satisfying. The poet Heine, writing in the 1830s, seems to have glimpsed how far ahead of his times Spinoza was in this respect: "There is in Spinoza's writings a certain inexplicable atmosphere, as though one could feel a breeze of the future. Perhaps the spirit of the Hebrew prophets still rested on their late descendant." What would this "God-intoxicated" man have made of his own intellectual descendants? They include many people who openly profess atheism, and even though atheism now carries no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States, it is hard to imagine Spinoza being altogether happy to embrace it. What were for him the most important qualities among those traditionally attributed to God are, in his philosophy, qualities of the universe itself. God is not fictitious; He is all around us. Spinoza's God is admittedly so different from anyone else's that a case can be made for saying that he was an atheist without realising it; but it does appear that he believed that he believed in God. It is sometimes said that the birth of Judaism constituted an intellectual advance over most earlier religions because it reduced a panoply of gods to the one God of monotheism. On this way of thinking, Spinoza may be considered to have continued the work of his distant Hebrew ancestors by performing a further subtraction of the same sort, and reducing the duo of God and world to one."

— The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb