That sure backfired...

justmoon
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That sure backfired...

Spinoza wrote: "[C]onceive, if possible, that God does not exist: then his
essence does not involve existence. But this (by Prop. vii.) is absurd.
Therefore God necessarily exists."

lol. I wonder if he actually considered that a valid argument or whether he wrote it in order to keep things cool with the church.

The fallacy committed here is that you cannot define something into existence. I can say that there is a perfect diamond in my garden and that perfection entails existence, so it must exist. But when I look for it later, I will discover that I made a mistake. Observation must be the basis of logic.
So if you have seen God and have in fact found him to be perfect and you know also from observation that all perfect things exist, then you could make that argument. - Funny how in fact most perfect things do NOT exist.


The Patrician
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Perhaps.  It's worth

Perhaps.  It's worth pointing out that The Ethics deals with God as the universal substance, not in the Abrahamic sense though.

Freedom of religious belief is an inalienable right. Stuffing that belief down other people's throats is not.


rexlunae
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Seems like just another

Seems like just another restatement of Anselm's Ontological Argument.


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If I remember right

If I remember right Spinoza's god is more of a pantheist idea.


Jacob Cordingley
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I've never heard anything

I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life: stuff exists, therefore God exists. There is no deduction here. Here is a  simple deductive form:

All A's are B's

C is an A

C is a B

Here is what I read in Spinoza's comment:

A is a B

C is a B

Two totally separate and logicless points.

Thinking about it I have heard more absurd things. One such absurdity is Christianity.