Spinoza's Argument Against the Doctrine

Spinoza's Argument Against The Doctrine Of Final Causation Spinoza wants to rule out prejudices in human thought that have come about because of the traditional concept of God and have resulted in a belief in final causation, which Spinoza feels causes a confusion between cause and effect, attributing effects as causes for natural phenomena. He focuses on teleological reasoning as one of these prejudices. He finds that teleological reasoning is dangerous for several reasons. First, he feels like teleological reasoning anthropomorphizing God and/or nature.

This is due to the fact that people assume that God's intellect would mirror mankind's, and that God would be doing things for certain purposes. Nature does not have to have a reason or a purpose. Moreover, people assume that nature has been created for the use of human beings. Spinoza believes that there is a fallacy behind the anthropomorphic conception of God or nature. Furthermore, because God has been anthropomorphized, normative and aesthetic standards that have been established by humans have somehow become associated with the divine.

Spinoza feels like there are several flaws in teleological reasoning. First, the real flaw is that men are frequently ignorance of the real causes of things, and this ignorance leads people to the idea that mankind is free in its thoughts and acts. In other words, people fail to properly connect causes and effects. Therefore, some things that follow logically from other actions are seen as arbitrary. In fact, according to Spinoza, the doctrine of final causation is founded on the sanctuary of ignorance.

Specifically, Spinoza is concerned about the ignorance of efficient causes. This ignorance can be systemic or specific to a person or subgroup of people, and happens when the person lacks understanding about why People find themselves tempted to blame God's will for events when a real causal explanation is not readily available. However, the blanket response that God's will is responsible for the event does not actually explain the event, but simply puts it in an "unexplainable" category.

Spinoza suggests that because men act towards a purpose, they tend to look for the final causes of things. However, when they fail to immediately perceive the end of things, they do not continue looking outside of themselves for a final cause, but instead focus their attention on themselves and try to determine why someone would behave that way. Moreover, men apply this type of thought to the natural world, and think of natural things as a means to an end.

However, natural things do not exist for the pleasure of men or to further the means of men. In fact, according to Spinoza, it was the thought that God manipulated nature as a means of achieving an ends that led to worship rituals aimed at changing how God manipulated nature and make those manipulations more favorable to the worshiper. Furthermore, when natural disasters occurred, because mankind was looking for a reason, they attributed natural disasters to divine displeasure.

Spinoza disagrees with the anthropomorphizing of nature and believes that nature has no fixed goals, and that all final causes in nature are simply the figments of human imagination. He believes that the final cause doctrine actually inverts nature by turning effects into causes. Furthermore, Spinoza believes that this inversion has a negative impact on the idea of God because it attributes an end to God, which would mean that God was bringing about something that he lacks. Furthermore, Spinoza believes that teleological reasoning leads to instrumental reasoning.

This is because of the idea that when men believe that everything in nature was created to serve man, they look at everything other than themselves as means to an end. This results in men evaluating the worth of things solely in relation to how those things can serve man. This results in an imposition of values and worth in the natural world based solely on human ideals, which do not reflect the underlying order of the natural world.

Therefore, dichotomous human ideals such as good/bad, order/confusion, and beauty/ugliness are explained by the means-ends analysis that is part of the final causation theory. Under these parameters, those items that serve human beings are considered good, while those items that might oppose human beings are considered bad, even if there is no way to logically judge the ethical position of the item, animal, or event in question.

In order to assess whether Spinoza's argument against final causation is effective, it is critical to understand how Spinoza defines causation. He believes that the self-caused being is that whose essence is existence. He believes that causation is where an actual (existent) cause leads to an effect. Causation turns potential into reality. Spinoza also looks at causation on the level of existence, where it involves an actual being causing a potential being to come into existence.

Obviously, this type of causation exists when human beings create a person, but it may also exist where God causes a person to come into existence. However, those beings that are self-caused require no external cause for actualizing. God would be self-caused. In fact, that God is self-caused is the fundamental ontological difference between God and other beings; while one can imagine anything else in the world as not existing, one cannot image God as not existing.

Looking at the foundation of Spinoza's argument, it becomes apparent that there are several significant flaws in the argument. First, in order to destruct the teleological argument implied in final causation, Spinoza uses the premise that one cannot imagine God as not existing. However, that simply is not true, particularly to a modern audience. Many people can imagine God not existing; atheists and agnostics are a minority in society, but they are not an insignificant minority.

Moreover, as people gain greater understanding of previously mysterious scientific processes, it becomes easier for people to conceive of a world without God. To premise an argument on the notion that God's non-existence is inconceivable in a world that lacks any tangible proof of God's existence makes the argument very weak. Those with faith in God may find Spinoza's argument compelling, but those who lack that faith and want proof of his existence before accepting it as fact will immediately see this requirement as a weakness in Spinoza's argument.

However, many people who are devout and profess a belief in God are biblical literalists who believe that the notion that God created mankind in his image necessarily implies that man and God share many attributes. Combine that basis with the fact that mankind ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, giving them the ability to discern good from evil. A literalist interpretation leads many people to the conclusion that mankind's motivations are going to be similar to God's motivations, despite the fact that several biblical vs.

warn people against assuming that they can understand divine motivation and reasoning. Spinoza tries to defeat that type of reasoning with a proof leading to the conclusion that only one being can have the substance of God. His proof involves the following reasoning: substance exists; substance must be finite or infinite; if substance is finite, there must be another substance of the same nature; there cannot be another substance of the same nature; therefore, substance exists as infinite.

However, humankind certainly has not always worshiped a single deity, so the fact that Spinoza's argument rests upon the idea that substance cannot be finite because there cannot be another substance of the same nature belies thousands of years of worship in polytheistic religions. Therefore, it is clear that a substantial number of people might find Spinoza's argument ultimately not convincing.

However, if one begins at the same starting point as Spinoza, which means that one assumes not only the existence of God, but also that God is infinite; his argument becomes simultaneously more and less convincing.