Episode 165: Spinoza on Biblical Criticism (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 165 is something like, is the Bible compatible with religious tolerance? And we read Benedict de Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published in 1670, chapters one through seven, plus we skimmed on through chapter 11. To get the readings and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer begging for your tolerance in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:23 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, not unusually smart, but with an exceptionally vivid imagination. In Austin, Texas.

0:30 Wes: This is Wes Alwan and Seth took mine. And I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:35 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, avoiding superstition in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:39 Mark: We are finally back to Spinoza. Hope people enjoyed the reissue of the old Spinoza on theology episode that we just re released. The this one does not overlap with that very much. It's very much not a theological tract. It's more about biblical criticism, which was a political issue of his day.

0:56 Wes: Yeah, let's elaborate on what you said. The question for the podcast was right, which was whether was it religion is compatible with religious tolerance?

1:04 Mark: Whether the Bible is compatible with religious tolerance.

1:07 Wes: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. More generally, it's the question of the compatibility of faith and reason, and specifically reason we can break down into a number. It becomes clear as you read the book that reason means quite a few different things. It means natural science, it means moral philosophy, it means political philosophy, philosophical theology, you know, what we might learn about God from philosophizing about him. And ultimately it's about whether religion is in conflict with the right sort of state, with a good polis, which turns out to be a sort of liberal democracy or a free republic, as Spinoza puts it, where freedom of thought and speech are essential.

So that's sort of a breakdown of the types of conflicts. And then on the other hand, whether religion, since it's often used to enslave or used for the sake of simply power politics, you know, certain doctrinal conflicts, for instance, are turned into political struggles. Whether it has to be that.

2:09 Dylan: That sounds like a pretty good overview. He says sort of that much in the preface, you know, saying that the whole thing is pointed towards the political question. But for the part we read, it's all about biblical interpretation.

2:24 Wes: He does mention freedom of thought and the political implications. I mean, it comes up in each chapter at some point.

2:31 Mark: So our overall strategy is we're going to deal with the Bible stuff this time, for the most part, and then turn toward the political stuff in a second full discussion.

2:40 Wes: I haven't read the other part yet. Carefully taking notes of this isn't. I'm not drawing on anything but what we read.

2:46 Unknown speaker: Right.

2:46 Dylan: I'm not denying that the political question runs through, but there's a deep focus on hermeneutics of biblical interpretation at the beginning, which I think is an interesting question about why he would start that way.

2:59 Wes: So the interpretation. Yeah, that's mostly chapter seven. It seems clear to me that his thesis there is that interpretative promiscuity with regards to the Bible leads to oppression or its use for power and doctrinal conflict. In fact, he says it directly. I can wait on doing the quotation if we want to wait for that.

3:19 Mark: Well, so Seth, had a lot of time to read this, not being in the last couple discussions.

3:22 Seth: Tell.

3:23 Mark: Give us your introduction, Seth.

3:25 Seth: Well, you guys know that Spinoza is one of my favorite philosophers, if not my favorite philosopher of all time. And just for pure entertainment value, I find to be one of the most fun of his books to read. It's not so much for. I mean, I know that we're taking a focus on a hermeneutic aspect of biblical interpretation, but it's the way in which he approaches the subject with a kind of dispassionate rationalism, but completely girded by conviction that it has to be read to be believed. I'm sorry that. I guess that's the only way I can think of how to describe it.

The way in which he takes on the task of trying to simultaneously acknowledge the Scriptures as being sacred and carrying some kind of revelatory message, and acknowledging that revelation is of a different order than knowledge that can be divined through reason, but at the same time, respecting that and then going ahead and finding a way to still apply a very rational approach to the text to bring it all into harmony. It's probably one of the more elegant attempts to find the common ground between reason and faith that you'll find in the history of Western thought.

4:50 Wes: By the time we get to the end of chapter two, he's telling us that the prophets can't even really tell us very much about God. They don't really necessarily have a sound conception of God, and revelation and prophecy have a really, really limited function. They're not going to give us as much about God as we can get from philosophy. They're not going to tell us about the nature of the God, really. They're Going, give us this bare bones God who. It's that God exists and that he cares, basically. But if you're worried about a conflict between the Bible and reason, or faith and reason, the threat of prophecy is that it gives you this alternative vision of reality and nature and whether it's scientific claims or whether claims about human nature, and a lot of it is just wrong.

Right. And you have to save religion from that. You have to save religion from the fact that. That a lot of those claims are at least wrong in the sense they're not compatible with Spinoza's rationalist picture of things. So that's the conflict he has to solve in these first two chapters.

5:54 Mark: Yeah. So folks that listened to our Spinoza on God episode will know that he has this long sort of geometric proof for what God is metaphysically. And it actually becomes very difficult to state the view. And, you know, we considered a lot of different difficulties in articulating it, but it's certainly one of the implications is that you can't have a personal God. Right? God is everything. So God is not a dude that talks to you in any sense. He does not show his face. He does not command you to do things, except insofar as God, as the whole of existence, commands everything to do things like his nature and his will, all are the same thing.

So talking about the universal order of the universe, the causal order, that is talking about the will of God, you hit one billiard ball with another. It's not that God intervened and he saw that one billiard ball was coming and then made the other one. Like, he doesn't have to get involved with that. God operates through the structure of existence, which is universal scientific laws. So that seems to contradict a lot of what is said about God talking to people and commanding them to do certain things, and then they disobey and he's mad at them.

And so he has to somehow rationalize all this. He has to explain why the writers of the Bible would say this, that they were still somehow divinely inspired, but that they were channeling the prejudices of their time. They weren't all that bright, and they could not use reason in the way that Spinoza did in his Ethics, which had not been released at this point. He gives some of the little things in footnotes here, but, like, he can't assume the detailed knowledge of his system and his readers, and he's not trying to. It's actually aimed at kind of a popular audience.

7:51 Dylan: One thing about the prophets in the workings of God's will, that he points out, is that when they say that God is speaking to them, it's always metaphorical. It's never actually in a voice and it's never commanded in that way.

8:05 Wes: Well, it's always through, he says, through words or images. Which is chapter one, section seven, sections eight through 10. I think he's focused on saying, well, these are imaginary except for God's relationship to Moses, as far as I understand it, which is a peculiar relationship. But for the rest of the prophets, these were basically visions. These were, you know, if you were more skeptical, you might call them hallucinations. That's what he's trying to prove. It's not that God created a visible, tangible, or audible version of himself. In fact, in section 12 of chapter one, he says, that would be a really strange thing.

Let's say that God created this creature that sort of like this automaton almost, which is going to walk around like any other natural being. Now it's part of the natural world. It's on the scene, and it's going to say, I am God. Well, it isn't God. So anything that God could create within the natural spatiotemporal realm doesn't really have the right to say I am God. It's paradoxical. So these have to be visions.

9:04 Mark: And except insofar as everything can say I am God because God is everything,

9:10 Wes: or everyone can say I am an attribute of God or something like that, or I am causally related in this very important way to God. But, yeah, I don't know if I am God would be legit.

9:21 Mark: So he wants to draw comparisons and contrasts between prophetic knowledge and ordinary knowledge. Right, everybody. And this is going to be generalized when we get to this chapter on miracles. But it can't be that every instance of prophecy is somehow a miracle. Miracle is somehow God whispering in your ear. It has to be something that is possible for a human being. There have to be, like a psychological thing that happened. And the fact that in the Bible it says a lot that, like, well, God did this. Well, that's just kind of the way they talked in the old days.

This is from section 13, I think here the Jews never make any mention or account of secondary or particular causes. But in a spirit of religion, piety and what is commonly called godliness refer all things directly to the deity. For instance, if they make money by a transaction, they say God gave it to them. If they desire anything, they say God has disposed their hearts toward it. If they think anything, they say God told them. Hence we must not suppose that everything is prophecy of revelation, which is described in scripture as told by God to anyone, but only such things as are expressly announced as prophecy or revelation or are plainly pointed to as such by the context.

So at the very least, I think he's saying that to kind of rule out that not every time the word God is mentioned or that is an instance of prophecy. I think we could perhaps expand what he's saying there to say that even cases of prophecy still have to be. Can we say that? What exactly do we think is the relation? He says that prophetic knowledge transcends ordinary knowledge. But I want to say that there has to be a connection as well. Like they're still people.

10:58 Wes: Yeah. So section two, by the way, of chapter one, that's the first place he sort of distinguishes divine knowledge from scientific knowledge, which is what? He doesn't use the word scientific. He's using the word natural a lot, but I'm going to call it scientific. And he uses this phrase, I think, exceeds the limits. So divine knowledge differs from scientific knowledge in that its subject matter exceeds its limits, or in other places in the text, because I did a search, he'll say the limits exceeds the limits of natural knowledge or exceeds the limits of our understanding, which he takes to be synonymous.

So it's something that's not accessible to understanding. This is the primary concessions he's going to make in these chapters on prophecy, which is that there is such a thing as divine knowledge. It's just going to turn out to be very limited in nature. It's not going to be able to tell us a lot about the nature of God, the sort of stuff that you could get philosophically, it's going to do something else.

11:48 Mark: But it could tell you about the future. For instance, like the temple will fall.

11:53 Seth: Right.

11:53 Wes: I thought he pooh poohed that, but I might be wrong.

11:56 Seth: No. So he says at the beginning that human beings are given to credulity and that they oftentimes mistake superstition for religion. And the ones who are most susceptible to that, you know, the chief victims are the people who are not well endowed with reason, the general masses. And so one of the things that he's extremely hostile to is people who do one of two things. If they say that they use religion to befuddle or confuse or distract or abuse or mislead the common people and people who think that religion requires a tremendous amount of intellectual aptitude and reason, he's trying to prove that divine knowledge, prophetic knowledge, has a very limited and a very simple message, and it's not to be grasped with the intellect like reason, it's to be obeyed.

And so this whole exercise of this book is to point out the ways in which the language of the Bible can be confusing, to make the distinction between natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge, to show how anything that seems contradictory or confusing should be interpreted metaphorically, to make the point about how things have to be said in their own historical time period. And we have to understand that the books were chosen to be put in certain orders and there's parts that are missing, and that if you don't know Hebrew, you're not going to get very far anyway.

So it's really a sustained attempt to try to argue that the very simple message that comes through both New and Old Testament, and presumably any religious book, and that we need to understand that the vehicle to get that message across was created with a very specific audience in mind. And that audience is not philosophers.

13:46 Wes: So what does divine knowledge tell us, I take it to be it simply tells us that there is a God, he cares, and ultimately that we ought to obey. And so a lot of this prophetic stuff, and I think he does that in the preface, that we ought to obey and that that's the limit of it. It doesn't tell us, as we've mentioned. So he concludes chapter two by saying God adapted His revelations to the understanding and opinions of the prophets, and that the prophets could be ignorant of matters of purely philosophical reasoning. In fact, he has a whole section on all the scientific errors that they make.

Believing that the sun revolves around the earth, for instance, so ignorant of matters of purely philosophical reasoning that are not concerned with charity and how to live, which implies that charity and how to live are somehow relevant, although he seems to suggest that they don't have much good information on that either. And indeed they were really ignorant in this respect and held contradictory views, hence knowledge about natural and spiritual matters. So they're not just spiritual gurus. It's not they're just bad scientists and spiritual gurus.

But knowledge about natural and spiritual matters is by no means to be sought from them. We therefore conclude that we are not required to believe the prophets in anything beyond what constitutes the end and substance of revelation. For the rest, everyone is free to believe as he pleases. And the end in substance is just that God exists, He cares, and that we ought to obey Him. A lot of the sort of trappings of these revelations and stuff and the way they're accommodated to people, it really is just to get them to obey. It really is just to get.

It's like this is early on in humanity's relationship with God and the first thing that has to happen is that you have to get them in line before they become philosophers and get to know God better.

15:26 Mark: Right. So if you're looking at the New Testament, at the gospel that is supposed to be aimed at everyone, then really it isn't going to have anything in it more specific than be charitable, love God, love other people. But most of the examples that he talks about, you know, all the ones in the prophecy chapter, he does talk about the New Testament later.

15:47 Seth: Right.

15:48 Mark: The fact that he's Jewish, doesn't like. He still regards. He has things to say about Christ and these things. But he is appealing in his audience to a Christian audience as well, and he's acknowledging that as a legitimate part of revelation and in fact has some special things to say about Jesus. But again, Wes, as you said, what he's writing about here, you know, it's God talking to Moses, God even talking to Adam. Yes, they have to do with moral matters of how you should live. But we still don't have to say that what he was saying to the prophets is something that again, anybody could figure out from reason.

Right. Anybody through reason can figure out the good, according to Spinoza. But in these olden times, he has a chapter on were the Jews special? And he says to some extent, yes, because there was this revelation of Moses that was aimed specifically at them, but it was to tell them how to live and have a functioning state at that time. So these were things that they could not have just figured out by reason. The prophets, Moses in particular, was given special knowledge, but the special knowledge was again, for specific commandments for them to do.

And in fact, he goes on to say that they really only applied to them in that time of place, and we don't have to pay attention to those specific things now.

17:05 Seth: Yeah.

17:05 Wes: And they're completely for the sake of instilling obedience in a sort of ignorant, unruly and Unruly. Yes, the word unruly people.

17:15 Dylan: In the preface, he says that the authority of the prophets has weight only in what has to do with the conduct of life and true virtue. Otherwise their opinions touch us little. I think the corollary is that everything that they say about God, you don't want to believe a hoot about it. Not even a single word of it.

17:33 Seth: Nope.

17:33 Dylan: The thing that you would most associate with prophets, that is they tell us about God and the future. None of that is what you should

17:42 Wes: pay any attention to except that you must acknowledge God. So that's the fight they're fighting. Not whether people know the right things about God, know his nature, but that they will acknowledge his existence. It's a kind of bare level thing that revelation is doing, isn't it?

17:59 Dylan: For the sake of their own authority. The appealing to God becomes a way to undergird their own authority politically so as to give them power and demand obedience out of the unruly masses. And the way to do that is to appeal to their connection to God.

18:19 Mark: He uses it as a diagnosis of what's happened subsequently. Like that's what he's fighting against politically. I don't think he attributes that to like Moses, that Moses had sinister motives and was trying to whip people into shape for his power or anything like that.

18:34 Wes: Right.

18:34 Dylan: Well, it doesn't necessarily have to even be sinister. Right. It just, it could be merely utilitarian.

18:40 Wes: He was out for the good of his people, unlike the power hungry. So this is sort of the distinction Orwell hammered out with his notes on nationalism is the distinction between really caring about the good of a people, even if you're doing means justifies the ends kind of stuff and sort of spiritually enslaving them, which is kind of what he accuses Moses of and really just being out for one's own power and not being out for the good. So I think he would say Moses is out for the good of his

19:07 Dylan: people, but it amounts to there. It's just a question of whether it's a noble lie that a leader like Moses knows is not true, but he's presenting the lie in order to garner obedience for the sake of the community itself, you know, for the sake of them. Or if it's purely about power, and it's totally right that he basically wants to indict current and not so current religious leaders as being petty power hungry monarchs.

19:39 Wes: So this is, yeah, section 15 of chapter two. So he says things for instance, like in fact, it is hardly likely that people accustomed to Egyptian superstition who were primitive and reduced to the most abject slavery should have any sound conception of God. Or that Moses taught them anything other than a way of life and that not as a philosopher, so that they might eventually live well. In other words, he's not Aristotle with the Nicomachean ethics saying here's the key to happiness, none of that or from liberty of mind, which it turns out is going to be a key to actually being happy and actually really living by divine law, but as a legislator obliging them to live well by command of the law.

For this reason, the right way of living or the true life and worship and love of God was more servitude to them than true liberty and the grace and gift of God. Ultimately that turns out just to be for the sake of their continued existence as a society. And again, I think as a means to this bare bones connection to God. It's like he's sort of a black box. Everything you know, you know nothing about him except that he's the Creator and he exists and that you have to obey and that's it. So I still think he's leaving. There's still something significant there to revelation, but it's just, it's stripped down to the barest of essentials.

21:03 Mark: So I want to argue that Spinoza would not characterize any of this as it happened in the biblical narratives as a lie on the part of Moses or the other leaders. Certainly the way that they interpreted their revelations involved importing a lot of then current beliefs. So they were mistaken or their imaginations, you know, oh, I saw God as a pillar of fire. Is that a philosophical claim, that God is a pillar of fire? Well, no, there's sort of a mixture of things of how do you articulate the inarticulable. There's a lot of sort of ways that that could creep in.

Maybe it was also that he was more vague than that and the person that actually wrote it down added the pillar of fire stuff because again, this was the kind of stuff that was just in folklore at that point. So there are lots of ways that these errors could fit in. But the reason I thought that prophecy involved accurate fortune telling is because that is how he describes it in terms of if you do these things, your society will flourish.

22:06 Wes: Where is this?

22:07 Mark: One of the examples he gives of this is a story about Adam. So this is in the chapter four on divine law. And he uses this just to give the distinction between the way that law works in natural science, in other words, God's nature. God is universal laws of things happening. And so a prophetic insight could be we as a society better do this thing or we're going to fall apart. And so that's the kind of knowledge that transcends ordinary. Like you couldn't probably even figure out that particular thing just by being very astute and looking at the content of your society and being a good political scientist like you couldn't figure that out. There's something beyond the ordinary happening here. And he just straight up says, I

22:52 Wes: don't know where does he say that Section nine? Yeah. There he's giving his interpretation of the, of Genesis where he says, don't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Well, his command can't be a command in the strict sense because then it would be a universal law of nature and it wouldn't even be possible for Adam to have done that. So it can only be a recommendation where he says, if you do this, then these bad things will happen.

23:19 Mark: God is stating the fact. Or rather Adam as prophet is somehow intuiting, you know, through his this imaginative whatever is causing prophecy. And again, he says somewhere in here what the actual cause of prophecy is. I don't know, there must be some natural cause. So that's something we could bring up again later. Like, well, how does that differ from a miracle? I think that's interesting. As you said, this is one of just the things that he's just going to grant to the Bible as we. He doesn't say we have to accept this on faith. He thinks that ultimately we can justify why the Bible is authentic by the fact that it tells us true moral things.

In other words, we can use our moral intuitions given to us by reason and compare them to the Bible and we will see this is a positive claim. We will see that the Bible, insofar as you are interpreting it correctly, as only giving moral rules. And a lot of those only specific to the ancient Jews and only a few of them applicable to us now. That's how we know that the Bible actually should be trusted. And that even doesn't even tell us that the whole thing should be trusted because it came from a lot of different authors anyway, we're getting into a lot of different bits of it here.

24:30 Wes: Yeah, I'm still not sure that prophecy can. I didn't see from this that he thinks prophecy can adequately predict the future,

24:37 Mark: but it can predict cause and effect with regard to moral behavior. The prophets were telling people to do stuff, and they were actually, even though the people didn't recognize that, the people just thought that it was Moses just telling them stuff like any king would tell them stuff. But really Moses had this superior insight and so he really knew facts about how the society would fall apart if they didn't obey all these particular rituals.

25:06 Wes: Well, I see the logic of Mark's argument. I just don't remember any specific place where that, where he actually says that.

25:12 Mark: Well, that story about Adam is what I was referring to. So it's not that it could only be a recommendation, it's that Adam thought It was only a recommendation, but really it was a statement of fact. Like, if you pick the apple, bad stuff will happen to you.

25:29 Seth: The way that I learned about the prophets and the way that I maybe I'm reading that into this, but I also think it comes through in his analysis is that the prophets, they're not delivering knowledge or they're not delivering specific guidance to do X or do Y. Prophets only appear in times when the people are wayward, at least as far as, you know, the. As far as Jews are concerned. So the only purpose of the prophets is to try to remind people of the covenant and bring them back to observance and obedience to God and the law. So usually what they do is they just warn you, if you keep doing what you're doing, bad things are going to happen.

What you should be doing is the stuff that is written in the book, you know, that the rabbis tell you or whatever. And the way you should take seriously that I'm delivering this message firsthand is a sign, right? Some kind of a sign. And that's really the function of the prophet, at least as far as the Old Testaments are concerned. And I think it's part of the reason why he spends time where he talks about whether apostles count as prophets or not, whether they're teachers and prophets or just teachers or what and where their authority stems from.

26:59 Wes: So I'm wondering now if the commandments are. Does the substance of the matter, because he even says at some point, well, they'd get it wrong. It's not just don't steal, but something even more about your mindset. I know he says the commandments are just for the Hebrews and for that particular place in time. But I'm wondering if the substance of the matters or if it really is just about having any set of rules for these unruly people. And that goes to this question of whether the prophets are really giving us life advice, even if it's just tailored to existing at a certain place in certain time, or if it's something more bare bones than that, where they're just demanding some sort of obedience and that's enough.

27:45 Dylan: It does stand out that there's no discussion of the content of the prophecies or the rules themselves. Like, for instance, there isn't an articulation or analysis of the commandments. And like, what the content of those rules would be. Just the fact that there are rules. And prophets talk about rules.

28:08 Mark: Well, he talks about like specifically the golden calf and the fact that they were given the commandments. Don't worship any other gods besides me. And then they turned around and they were worshiping a calf. And this is like one of the things that is supposed to just show that even the Hebrews, even these chosen people are rotten, that they just turn and do something rotten, like at the first possible opportunity, something disobedient. Although Spinoza gives a spin on that. It's actually because they were so confused about the nature of God and that they could think like, yeah, that golden calf must be got.

You know, it could be an honest mistake. It couldn't just be disobeying. But it was obviously important that for Moses in the story not to just say, okay, fine, the calf is God. Everyone must worship the calf. Like, if it was really true that, like, you just had to have some rules to keep people in order, then you maybe could. Well, they just didn't understand the first time what I meant by a commandment number one. And so I, I'm just. I think they can obey this one. If I point at the damn calf in the first place, I don't think that quite follows.

Right?

29:10 Dylan: Because you could say that he's smart enough to know that these particular commandments are going to allow them to move around. Right? And it doesn't have to be as efficient as saying, well, as soon as they start walking towards something and they start looking at this rock and everybody likes the rock, now we're going to say the rock is divine. It could be that Moses was smart enough or God spoke to him so that it would be clear enough that that wasn't going to be the way to get people to obey in such a way as that they flourish.

29:47 Wes: Right. He says explicitly again in that chapter two, section 15, that for Moses commanded them to love God and observe his law in order to show their gratitude for God's past blessing, liberation from Egyptian servitude, etc. He also thoroughly frightens them with menaces should they transgress these laws, while at the same time promising many rewards if they would observe them. Thus, he taught them the same way as parents teach their children prior to the age of reason. That is why it is certain that they were ignorant of the excellence of virtue and true happiness.

He's not teaching them how to flourish, as Dylan just said. Are there specific teachings there that are, you know, even if they don't give you a nice virtue, ethics where you can be happy that they give you survival and other basic things? Or is it just that obedience is enough for survival? Here's a leader. He needs some rules. The Rules can be quite a variation. What the rules are, they are adapted at the times into his own temperament and all that stuff. But really you just need rules.

30:51 Mark: I would vote we revisit this issue when we do our second half, because I know from what we've seen so far that he's very indebted to Hobbes. Hobbes is sort of the very foundation of his political philosophy. And even though he's going to say actually we have many more rights that we can't actually give up than Hobbes might say, Hobbes says we have the right to self defense and we can't give that up. Spinoza wants to extend that at least to the right of being able to think and speak as you please. So we're going to see. But it would make sense.

The picture that you're describing, it sounds like a very Hobbesian picture that what's important to keep the society together, at least to the extent that people are corrupt and don't have the divine light of reason guiding them, then yeah, just law of any sort is what you need. I just want to turn back to this whole prophecy as if you say that he's so denuded prophecy that it can't involve predictions like that would get rid of a hell of a lot of what prophecy has to say. And so just searching on the verb predict, it's actually still all over the place here.

So like in chapter two on the prophets, section five, he says all prophetic certainty was grounded upon three things that the matters revealed were very vividly imagined upon a sign, and three, most importantly, that the minds of the prophets were directed exclusively to what is right and good. So the number two is here upon a sign. He says Scripture does not always mention a sign, must nevertheless, suppose the prophets always had one. The Bible does not always mention every condition and circumstance, as many have already noted, but assumes that some things as known.

We may further grant that the prophets who prophesied nothing new beyond what is contained in the law of Moses, had no need of a sign because they were corroborated by the law. For example, the prophecy of Jeremiah about the destruction of the Jerusalem was confirmed by the prophecies of the other prophets and by the admonition of the law, and therefore did not need a sign. But Hananiah, who prophesied contrary to all the other prophets, a swift restoration of the city necessarily required a sign. Otherwise he would have to be in doubt about his own prophecy until the outcome of his prediction confirmed it.

32:53 Wes: Just to clarify, the sign is not the thing that makes us convinced or certain about the prophecy. The sign is the thing that makes the prophet convinced. So in 6, he directly says this. He says the signs were given for nothing other than to convince the prophet. It follows that the signs were given according to the prophet's belief and understanding. In other words, the signs are just bogus and made up according to the prophet's particular prejudices. It's the way they acquired certainty. And number three, he says, most importantly, it's that the minds of the prophets were directed exclusively to what is right and good.

And that criterion seems to be quite different because the prophets themselves can't know whether their minds are directed exclusively to what is right and good. None of us really know that at any given time. So that's like an external, objective criteria. Like, if the prophets have that directedness of mind to the right and the good, then the specific trappings of the prophecy aren't all that important and the sign itself is just going to be something according to his prejudices. But it's the intention that counts, not the factuality.

34:00 Mark: Yeah, I mean, he's saying a lot about how these signs will vary according to the beliefs, according to even the mood of the prophet.

34:09 Wes: In particular, revelation is different from the

34:12 Mark: sign, but it seems like he said God revealed to Moses, who was angry with Pharaoh at the time, the terrible massacre of the firstborn. So I still think that it's compatible with Spinoza has to say here that Moses predicted the massacre of the firstborn and then the massacre of the firstborn actually happened. That, like, prophecy actually is predicting something.

34:33 Seth: It's predicting in this sense, Moses, if you do not let my people go, this is what is going to happen. I did not let Pharaoh.

34:44 Mark: Sorry, Pharaoh, Pharaoh, I'm not going to let your people go.

34:47 Seth: That's right. I just. Every time I see that, I have Yul Brynner in my brain. Where is your Hebrew God now, Moses? So it's a prediction, but it's not a prediction in the sense of I'm having, you know, like Joseph is going to foresee seven years of wealth followed by seven years of famine. It's simply saying, I have been given a sign that says, you must let us go. If you don't, these things are going to happen. That's a prediction of sorts. But it's not a prediction in the sense where Moses says, I have foreseen this happening. It's not a vision, it's not foreknowledge, it's him being told by God, pass

35:28 Wes: this message on, yeah, so that's the question. And I think, yeah, Mark is coming down on the other side of it. So the question we're asking is whether we can reduce prophecy even if they're making accurate predictions. Is it just. Is there a naturalistic explanation of it? Is it, oh, they're good calculators, they're good at no. Or is it something that transcends naturalistic explanation, where they're just. They're clairvoyant? In other words, in my mind, that would make it a type of miracle. In other words, something that contradicts or is above the natural order of things. And I suspect in general, yeah, he doesn't like that. And that's why I come down more on your side, Seth, and Mark's side. Although I think Mark has a point.

36:09 Mark: In the miracles chapter, section 21, he says, since prophecy is beyond human understanding and is a purely theological issue, I could not say or know what it is in itself as such, except on the basis of revealed principles.

36:22 Wes: Yeah, maybe Mark is making a good point there. He's just pleading ignorance on that. Maybe he is saying, well, yeah, there are predictions, and I. This one I can't explain.

36:31 Mark: And I think that's typical of how he's going to treat miracles. Not that we have to give that whole overview right now, but just that there's a number of them he wants to deny. But he's not like Hume, who just says, look, anything that seems weird, that would seem to contradict laws of nature just didn't happen. Like Spinoza instead says, anything that seems to contradict laws of nature does not in fact contradict laws of nature. It has to be explicable through something that actually happened. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't think the Red Sea actually parted it.

He just means that if it did, and maybe we can't know if it did because of the historical distance between us and what might have happened to the text in the meantime and how these stories get compiled and all that stuff. We don't really know what happened compared to what people said about it. But if they're reporting accurately what happened, well, I guess it happened. It's just that it happened according to some natural law that we just. We don't know well, and importantly, the

37:26 Dylan: prophets don't speak in those terms. Back in chapter two, section five, the certainty that arose in prophets from signs was not mathematical. That is one that follows from the necessity of the perception of the matter being perceived or seen. But only moral and signs were not given unless to persuade the prophet. Hence it follows that signs were given with respect to opinions and capacities of the prophet. And then it goes on to the stuff that we talked about earlier, that it depends on the mood of the prophet, that the signs are for the persuasion of the prophet himself, that the revelation is correct, I mean, that he's had something revealed to him.

But the revelation itself, he goes on, varied with each prophet with respect to the disposition of the temperament of the body, with respect to that of the imagination, and with respect to the pattern of the opinions he had embraced beforehand. For it varied with respect to the disposition in this mode, namely, if the prophet was cheerful, to him were revealed victories, peace, or whatever moves human beings to joy. For these sorts of men used to imagining such things more often. If, on the other hand, he was sad, to him were revealed wars, comeuppances and every evil.

And thus, as a prophet was compassionate, flattering, angry, harsh, etc. To the extent he was more capable of these rather than those revelations. But the terms of the prophecy seemed tuned to the prophet and importantly aren't based upon mathematical signs or something that would, as he talks about earlier, doesn't involve a certainty of its own nature. It involves a certainty of the prophet, a separate authority of the prophet, whereas rational certainty would be a certainty of its own nature.

39:08 Wes: Yeah, and the other thing I want to re emphasize just looking over these passages is this. So in section 14 of chapter two is this kind of bare bones conception of God that I think he's arguing the prophets are communicating. So he says, in fact, anyone who reflects on Moses opinions without prejudice will plainly see he believed God to be a being that has always existed, exists and will always exist. And for this reason he calls him Jehovah by name, which in Hebrew expresses these three tenses of existence. But Moses taught nothing else about his nature except that he is merciful, kind, etc.

And in the highest degree jealous, as is clear from several passages in the Pentateuch. And then he had other bad ideas about God basically. So yeah, all of that, you know, the fact that their temperament differs, the fact that their signs are going to differ according to their preconceptions and prejudices, none of that interferes with the basic communication of God as this being. And elsewhere he says that he's the Creator and that he cares and all that stuff. Those are never inaccurate for the prophets. Those are never just a matter of their particular prejudice.

Those are sort of the universal truths that shine through whatever the particular trappings are.

40:25 Dylan: I'm just going to call Back to Seth's comment that on the one hand, he seems to be undermining prophets and prophecy altogether, and he has what, on the face of it, in quotes that we've made, seems to be very, very harsh about it. But there's a funny way in which he is, in his writing, is sort of, frankly, but in an unprejudiced way, assessing what's going on. And there's a fair amount of giving it its due prophecy, its due that it ends up being in maybe what you would have thought naively would be a much smaller box, but it has its own box. Right.

41:05 Wes: It really depends on your tolerance for stripping away all the trappings and looking at them as irrelevant or deceitful. And so it's like you can see why someone would be horrified by this.

41:15 Dylan: They might excommunicate him.

41:17 Seth: Right?

41:18 Wes: Yeah, right. Of course. That they're the essence of all this. Because all he's doing, he's stripping all that stuff away and he's giving you this bare little kernel, this little, like, philosophical point of light, God, that doesn't have any of the personal qualities that are described in the Bible and all that stuff. And, yeah, I can see why religion, to a lot of people, is more than that bare philosophical view.

41:43 Seth: Well, it's also the case that if we go back to what Mark said earlier, and if we think about his project in the Ethics, which was published in his lifetime. Right. And got him in enough trouble. This, I believe, was posthumous.

41:55 Mark: No, this current text was published in his lifetime, although anonymously. The Ethics. Not until he was dead.

42:01 Wes: Yeah.

42:01 Dylan: Because he got in a lot of trouble for this. They figured out pretty quickly who wrote this.

42:05 Wes: Yeah, he had a mob come to his. The house he was staying at. Right.

42:09 Seth: I think there's a story about that.

42:11 Wes: He actually stayed with friends. He was a lens grinder in the attic. And, yeah, a mob came and I think his. The person who was. I can't remember the story.

42:19 Mark: I think somebody said something on Twitter about him and it really blew up, really.

42:24 Wes: Flash mobs.

42:24 Mark: Like, he got off the plane and his reputation was dog shit.

42:28 Seth: So if we take seriously the idea that he thinks that you can come to an understanding of the nature of God and correspondingly then derive what correct moral action is through reason and that this is in accordance with what's in the Bible, then he has to explain what the purpose of the Bible is and why it isn't the Ethics, why it isn't a giant geometric tract. Like, why is it that in order to get people to act morally, that they didn't set out a bunch of propositions and assumptions and then proofs. Why is it told in stories? And why choose these particular people to deliver this message in this particular way?

So, in a sense, he needs to create a space in his analysis for knowledge that can't be grasped or can't be derived via the intellect. Because if he were to just deny that that was possible or deny that it was useful, then he would basically be throwing away all of Scripture, which he wasn't willing to do. So I do think that he's taking a very sparse view of what prophets have to offer, because he's trying to strip away the possibility that people can either interpret them in an intellectual way, namely that they provided any piece of knowledge that could be discovered or grasped separately with reason, or that people use them as a basis for superstition.

So this idea that they were able to work miracles or things like that happen. And he needs to get right down to what's the purpose of prophetic knowledge and what was the role of the prophets? And it's really to just simply impress upon the common people that they are being wayward and that they need to return to moral ways. And I think that's all there is to it. Because if he grants them anything else, if he grants prophets anything else, it's going to cause problems with his rationalistic view of God and nature.

44:32 Wes: I think at the end of chapter seven, he'll say it's not doctrinally necessary that people even believe Spinoza's point of view about this, about his sort of philosophical speculations about God. And most people aren't philosophers anyway. But what's important is that different religions and their doctrinal differences can actually cohabitate, because those differences aren't actually essential. So if you're communicating God through certain ceremonies and rituals specific to one religion and also to another, it's fine if people believe all that stuff, as long as it's. Well, maybe it's not fine. Maybe that's just a question for later. But I had the impression it was fine that people didn't have to be philosophers.

45:16 Mark: So there's a few different elements. We've been talking mostly about chapters one and two on prophecy and on the prophets here, and then also a little on chapter three, whether prophecy was specific to the Hebrews. The other ones were. Chapter four is on divine law, which we've talked a little bit about the difference between law as just God causing things and God putting forth decrees for people to obey. We can say More about that. I gave sort of the introduction to that, chapter five on the reason why ceremonies were instituted and on belief in the historical narratives.

So we talked a little bit about ceremonies. In other words, just for a particular society, they were necessary to keep it together. But the ceremonial commandments are not something that we should be fighting over now. Like, that's a really important thing that follows it. The belief in the historical narratives is not something we've talked about yet. Chapter six on miracles, that's the other sort of missing piece of the puzzle, which I think maybe we should give the overview of that next. Just because one of the things that's been sticking us on prophecy is, could it be a type of miracle?

Does he allow any miracles at all? So again, let's maybe just at least outline that which is. I said before, it's not like Hume that he just rules out miracles. It's that everything that happens happens according to general scientific laws. And so, yeah, if you want to argue that a miracle actually took place, well, really, you shouldn't call it a miracle. A miracle just means it's something that actually happened within the causal order that we didn't expect to happen. So it's only a miracle with regard to our own understanding. And in fact, we really don't understand physics very well anyway.

Certainly the ancient people didn't understand physics. So it just was like the stuff that was out of the ordinary. It's not even like what they understood and what they didn't understand. They didn't understand much of anything. But like, this was regarded as weird. So they leaned on that.

47:05 Wes: I think it's important to point out that he's defining a miracle as something that is contradictory to the laws of nature or above them in the sense of not being within the causal order. Like something uncaused might happen. It's caused by God, in a sense. He sort of dips down into the causal order to do something, but it's not connected causally to any other events in space and time, let's say.

47:28 Mark: Or rather he says this is what the common understanding of miracles is. And if that's what a miracle is, then there are no miracles.

47:35 Unknown speaker: But.

47:36 Mark: But maybe we can redefine the term or say that a lot of the things picked out as miracles weren't that.

47:41 Wes: Yeah, if you just redefine the term to mean not a miracle to be something natural. I mean, there are no miracles. That's the upshot. And he says nothing happens contrary to nature. But part of his argument is that, well, he thinks he's shown before in chapter four that God's decrees are just natural law. So if you're thinking about God commanding things and making things happen, well, natural law is that it doesn't make sense to think that he's going to do something outside of natural law when that natural law just is his will and the way he functions. Besides which, God is better known by science and philosophy and the study of natural law than from miracles. He's better known in the sense as this omnipotent being. Miracles are these very limited acts, right?

48:26 Mark: A magic trick.

48:27 Wes: Yeah, that's good for a magician. But how about all of nature and the universe and all of those laws, those allow a better inference of God than a burning bush, let's say, or something like that.

48:40 Dylan: But isn't it importantly that miracles are one offs? Right. For which you can't really know anything. And they aren't, as we said, they're not tied to the way the world is. And in that way you haven't learned about God. Right, because you haven't learned how the world actually is.

48:58 Wes: To understand something, we must understand it causally. If they're outside of the causal chain, we can't understand it. And if we can't understand it, but we can't use it to understand anything about God or to know God.

49:10 Dylan: Yes. So if it's a one off, you're not going to understand God by it.

49:14 Seth: Can I just read the beginning of the chapter?

49:16 Dylan: Which chapter is that?

49:18 Mark: 6.

49:18 Seth: On miracles as men are accustomed to call divine, the knowledge which transcends human understanding, so also do they style divine or the work of God, anything of which the cause is not generally known. For the masses think that the power and providence of God are most clearly displayed by events that are extraordinary and contrary to the conception they have formed of nature. They think the clearest possible proof of God's existence is afforded when nature, as they suppose, breaks her accustomed order. And consequently they believe that those who explain or endeavor to understand phenomena or miracles through their natural causes are doing away with God and his providence.

They suppose, forsooth, that God is inactive so long as nature works in her accustomed order and vice versa. The power of nature and natural causes are idle so long as God is acting. Thus they imagine two powers distinct from one another. The power of God and the power of nature. So this is actually could not be a more clear statement of Spinoza's opinion of transcendence versus his conception of God as everything, as an attribute, or I can't remember what the other term is in the ethics of God as a substance. But he thinks, thinks it's just incoherent or fanciful to consider that somehow a miracle could indicate a way in which God subverts the natural order.

The way to think about that is if something happens that appears to not have natural causes or it appears to be out of the ordinary, then one of two things is the case. But it's really just one thing, which is there must be causes, natural causes which are unknown that affected that event or that action. And if you attribute that to God, you're essentially just saying there are natural causes that we are unaware of that are causing this. It's not the sense that there's an active intervention, as Dylan said, a one off where God is somehow saying this is the natural order of things.

And now I'm going to just, you know, have an eruption in there and change something. In fact, whatever happens is the natural order of things. And so even if it's only something that happens once in history, it has to be able to be understood as part of the natural order of things.

51:31 Dylan: To push back on it a little bit. Why wouldn't I say that raising someone from the dead would be a real demonstration of God's power and it is perfectly natural or in line with the interpretation that God is ruling the natural world in that there was a reanimation of that person by God through processes that brought them back to life. But only God has access to that power. So that it is within the universe a power, but not within a humanly accessible universe. We couldn't generate a machine, for instance. We couldn't repeat it ourselves. Why wouldn't that be in fact a proper and powerful display of God's power, but also not contradict the notion that whatever power God has is true of the universe. It's just that God has more power than everybody else does.

52:27 Wes: He actually brings this up. He says this is section one of the chapter on miracles, but that common people see him as two powers, one legislative and then one just a matter of brute force. Which would be the miracle part.

52:41 Seth: Dylan, to respond to that. I'm trying to digest it, but I don't think it's outrageous at all to say that God has powers that we don't. I mean, we can't create gravity, right? We can't manufacture gravity or change gravity. There's a variety of things that we can attribute to the natural world that if you see God as having the power to do those things, we do not. So if it were the case that there was an actual instance of the reanimation of dead flesh and the reconstitution of a human psyche and soul into a corpse, that there would have to be an acknowledgment that that's a possibility of the natural order.

But I also think, I get the feeling that Spinoza's inclination would be to say, given the weight of history and our understanding of the natural world and all, that it would be appropriate to be skeptical of the claim that somebody was actually reanimated or what have you, unless there was some way where it was witnessed. Again, even if we could not affect

53:41 Dylan: that, it's definitely the case that Spinoza's opinion is that these laws that God partakes in, that's part of nature, are eternal necessary truths. And insofar as they are eternal necessary truths, they're accessible to everybody insofar as observing their truth in the presence of God in all things. And so that goes contrary to the notion of one off, where there's been an exception, either by an infrequent and random or willful use of divine power that would appear to subvert that eternal natural order. And the way you could get around it is say, okay, well, that one off is really an indication that we don't understand the world well enough.

Right? And in that way, it sounds like the way in natural science you would see magnetism. And you say at first, you say, well, wow, that is a miracle. It's like going contrary to what I've ever done before. And then you turn it around and you start looking at it and trying to sort out what it's actually doing and understand its properties. And that scientific activity is based upon both those assumptions that the activity of that magnet is somehow necessary and unchanging under certain circumstances and therefore repeatable, but it's also utterly accessible to us.

55:06 Wes: There is a sustained argument that he makes. I don't want us to leave the impression that he just says this and that there's no argument, even though they may not work. So, for instance, in section 3, since natural law is God's will, then if a miracle contradicts that, he's contradicting his own will. Section 4. If God's helping hand is sort of needed, then nature as it stands is impotent. Nature as God's law, should be enough. So there is a sustained argument for. And then the other stuff that we already mentioned about God not being noble through miracles and is better known through natural law, I think he sees that as another argument against miracles that's more pragmatic it's just they don't do anything religiously, spiritually.

55:47 Mark: He admits that you could have a false prophet that does miracles.

55:51 Wes: Yeah, right. The Scripture does. So then later on, he's making arguments from Scripture. Right. So he's not claiming that there could be false prophets who do miracles. The Bible is which. What he's trying to argue there is that miracles aren't the key to getting a sound conception of God.

56:04 Mark: Even according to Scripture.

56:06 Wes: Even according to Scripture.

56:07 Seth: Yep. I don't have the same breakout of sections that you guys seem to be referring to in my. So this is just a couple pages into the chapter. Let us take miracle as meaning that which cannot be explained through natural causes. This may be interpreted in two either as that which has natural causes but cannot be examined by the human intellect, or as that which has no cause save God and God's will. But as all things which come to pass through natural causes come to pass solely through the will and power of God, it comes to this that a miracle, whether it has natural causes or not, is the result which cannot be explained by its cause.

That is a phenomenon which surpasses human understanding. But from such a phenomenon, and certainly from a result surpassing our understanding, we can gain no knowledge. Wherefore, so far as our understanding goes, those phenomena which we clearly and distinctly understand have much better right to be called works of God and to be referred to the will of God than those about which we are entirely ignorant, although they appeal powerfully to the imagination and compel men's admiration.

57:07 Mark: So he has a lot of the hermeneutic tools to merely dismiss all alleged miracles in Scripture as the prejudices of the writer. However, there's a slippery slope here that he could slide toward Hume's view, which is kind of what I hear you articulating, Wes, that he's just saying, really, there are no actual miracles. Section 14 in this Miracles chapter. Consequently, if we find certain things in the Bible for which we cannot attribute a cause which seem to have occurred beyond or even contrary to the order of nature, these things should not represent a problem for us.

Rather, we should be fully persuaded that whatever really happened, happened naturally. This is also confirmed by the fact that some of the details of miracles are sometimes omitted in the telling, especially in a poetic narrative. These details of such miracles, however, plainly show that they involve natural causes. For instance, in order for the Egyptians to be afflicted with boils, it was necessary for Moses to throw ashes up into the air. The locusts reached the land of Egypt by a natural command of God, namely, by means of a wind from the east that blew for a whole day.

And a night later they left because of a very strong wind from the west. See Exodus. He has another reference. It was by the same command of God, the sea opened up a path for the Jews. See Exodus 14:1, namely, because of an east wind that blew very strongly for a whole night. So these particular examples that he's pulling out make it sound like he believes that some of the alleged miracles actually happened. Maybe he's not sure of that, but he's certainly not going to dismiss that because they seem unlikely. It's just that he thinks that if they happened, they happened for natural reasons.

And this kind of thinking gave rise to a whole cottage industry of people like, oh, let's check, you know, what was going on astronomically at the time of the alleged Red Sea thing. Like, what can we point to that there really was a flood around the time that Noah has talked about all this kind of. It's called natural theology. It's ironic that that's part of the effort that has been criticized toward literalism that happened in the Enlightenment, that some of the past discussions that we've had about this kind of stuff is we've talked about hermeneutics or talked about, in the last Spinoza thing, I kept referencing Karen Armstrong, that I had just read her book, that she thought that, yeah, it was kind of understood in the olden days that people used sort of a poetic narrative.

Like, if you read a biography, it's going to be a mixture of myth and history. And they weren't really that troubled about the factual accuracy of the thing. And it was only like, with the Enlightenment coming in time, that people started with the Bible to insist that either it has to literally be true, it has to have actually be picking out historical facts, or else it's useless. Like, that's the only kind of reading that there could be. And so it's ironic that Spinoza is, on the one hand, I think, a significant move toward what we saw in Ricoeur and Schleiermacher about this hermeneutic method of not taking everything literally, but in his analysis of miracles in particular, the way he's talking about it, would give rise to this literalism of searching after historical causes, because if you set up that kind of test for religion, it's not going to work out so well for religion.

But I think Spinoza himself is more just like, well, it's a long time ago. We don't have really good documentation. We can't say for sure, and also

1:00:29 Dylan: giving the generous interpretation, something happened and even if it didn't happen exactly the way it was described.

1:00:35 Wes: So there is one other. And I know, Mark, you sort of segued into what this means for the interpretation. But before we go further into that, I just wanted to point out that the other thing which I thought was really important about this chapter is towards the end, section 22. It's sort of there are political implications to this. So he says, in addition, miracles require causes and circumstances, as we have already shown. They do not follow from the kind of autocratic government the common people ascribe to God, but rather from divine decree and government, which, as we have also shown from Scripture itself signifies the laws of nature and its order.

So there's this analogy between laws of nature which are universal and apply to everyone at all times, and then the kinds of laws you would have in a republic or a democratic society. And the difference between that and then just some sort of arbitrary, oh, I'm going to make this happen now. Not a legislative act, not something that happens at all times and places. Not even a law, really. A miracle is just not even law like so in that sense, it's analogous to just this one off autocratic action. And the significance of that is that the way Moses ran things, that was the sort of the superstitious kind of religion they had.

And it was a kind of slavery and it didn't allow for freedom of thought. And that was necessary for that time and place. But he is looking for a conception of God that doesn't lend itself to autocratic government, as he puts it. And then in section 23, to follow up, this is the part where he says, you don't even have to believe me. That's how seriously I take this freedom of thought thing. So he says, although I say that Scripture teaches these things, the things his interpretation of miracles that he's tried to get out of Scripture. However, I do not mean that the Bible promotes them as doctrines necessary for salvation, but only that the prophets embrace them just as we do.

Therefore, it is up to every man to hold the opinion about them that he feels best enables him to subscribe with all of his mind to the cult and religion of God. I like that use of the word cult. So if you want to believe this stuff, you want to believe there are miracles and that helps you be connected to God. I think he's allowing for that. Barring the larger political implications. Ultimately wise men, people who can reason, have to be in control of the state and that that would be an exceptional sort of person. Or you need the wisdom of the crowd.

You need a democratic consensus, which I think he thinks is more reliable than relying on one person.