Enlightened Chains, pg. 7

It would be wrong, and small-minded, though, to think of Spinoza as being simply atheistic. In fact, much like Martin Luther touching off the Reformation, Spinoza was motivated by his faith. It was his refusal to subvert the use of his intellect to doctrine that led to his stinging critique of the Church. Spinoza’s God was infused into every part of the universe. The personification of God in the Bible was just that - a personification. It was man’s attempt to make an infinite and inaccessible God easier to find.

There is much about a direct reading of Spinoza to justify his legacy as an “enemy of the faith”. This is true so long as one maintains that “faith” and “church” are synonymous. It is only necessary to turn to Spinoza’s Ethics to understand that his faith when beyond the church. His great act of heresy, then, not to deny God, but to put God above the Church and thereby deny the Church. The first section of Ethics deals with the existence of God in great detail and makes it clear that there is a God and that his power rules the universe.

It was David Hume that actually launched a more direct attack on faith - both the revealed faith upon which the Church depended and the more ambiguous and reasoned faith upon which natural religion depended. His Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding began with the essay “On Miracles” that thoroughly dispelled any idea that reason could be reconciled with the concept of any sort of event that occurred outside of the laws by which the universe was known to operate. In the essay, “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State” he attempts to do the same for the natural faith of Deism.

Hume’s most scathing attack is based on his insistence that it is unreasonable to believe that a perfect being could create such an imperfect world as exists. He then

Next Page