Reading Spinoza, or rather reading commentaries on Spinoza as Spinoza is too dense for my humble brain, is a bit of circular logic. God/nature exists because it cannot not exist. God/nature does what it does because that’s what it must do. God/nature is infinite and eternal because it is the uncaused cause.

God/nature is one substance because two substances cannot coexist. God/nature has infinite attributes of which we are aware of only two: Thought and extension. [Energy/matter, time/space, etc., what ancient Greeks philosophers called the Law of Opposites.] One thing is defined as what it is because of what it is not.

Spinoza’s God, like God itself, is circular in nature. One cannot exist without the other. They are one and the same.

Spinoza explored the Greek thought experiment of conatus, the tendency of all things animate and inanimate to ‘evolve’ or self-preserve, without direction or purpose, but an innate quality, nonetheless. Cells and rocks both have conatus, both are extensions of God’s thought. Conatus is central to Spinozism. God/nature has no plan, no goal, no direction, which would imply a beginning and therefore an end.

Religions find no comfort in Spinoza, who famously, and infamously, rejected religions as superstitions. Spinoza’s God was intellect itself; religions need not apply. I find comfort in Spinoza’s God, that I am part of that infinite and eternal substance, that it is part of me.

“He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.” – Spinoza