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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

One thing about Spinoza I find incredible is his description of how god must be a substance that permeates all nature and how god always and everywhere behaves the same way.

It takes right to my Science class in school: the laws of nature are the same everywhere. But I haven't read about any link between his philosophy and science from that age.

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It's a mechanistic, deterministic philosophy that takes the form of a rigid geometrical proof system, starting with the axiom that God is nature. It follows the rationalist scientific tradition of Cartesianism which believes that all knowledge can be derived a priori with deductive reasoning, accumulating an ever-increasing body of knowledge and projecting it on a neat coordinate system.

>One thing about Spinoza I find incredible is his description of how god must be a substance that permeates all nature and how god always and everywhere behaves the same way.

Somewhat loosely matches with ideas in Advaita Vedanta, up to the words "all nature".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

Personally I don't think that the Wikipedia article is a good description, but I am not a scholar; my opinion is just based on having heard and read about the subject from family and friends, and reading some books about it.

> One thing about Spinoza I find incredible is his description of how god must be a substance that permeates all nature […]

Standard Thomas Aquinas (and Aristotle?): [Gg]od is Being itself. Do a search for the term ipsum esse subsistens.

That's not the same thing. The classic formulation is saying that for God, existence is essential, while other beings (not god) do not essentially exist. Spinoza is arguing that God's existence underlies all of existence.

> […] God's existence underlies all of existence.

How is that different than Aquinas/Aristotle?

Most simply, because they aren't addressing existence of things other than god in their formulation. They're making a statement about God's own existence. Spinoza is talking about (the connection between God and) the world.

> Spinoza is talking about (the connection between God and) the world.

And so does Aquinas: "Article 1. Whether God is in all things? […] Article 2. Whether God is everywhere? […]"

* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1008.htm

1. I was responding to a comment invoking ipsum esse subsistent, and it remains true that it is not related to the position of Spinoza being discussed here.

2. According to Aquinas (as you linked), God is "present" inasmuch that God acts on all things ("God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works"), and Spinoza was certainly more extreme than that. Spinoza thought the world (and everything in it) is a "mode" of God.

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