… Read up on Spinoza's God yet? :think: :nono: I didn't think so. It'd require you to be more thoughtful, no? Proving a point requires you to read and invest.
My acquaintance with Spinoza is only indirectly through Einstein. But your indicating that I need to be conversant with Spinoza (or Einstein’ agreement with Spinoza) supports my side. See, I have made the point previously that a God who is so remote from us that we will miss Him if we don’t seek long and diligently is a God who is hiding rather than a God whose existence is obvious in the world around us. If it takes esoteric arguments from great thinkers like Spinoza and Einstein, who lived nearly 2000 years after Christ, to come up with a “killer proof” of the existence of God, then that is a God who the masses for two thousand years before Spinoza must have had seriously doubts about that God actually existing. Even today, I am seldom directed to deep philosophical arguments to prove God. Is the evidence for your God not something that can be shown as real and convincing without resorting to esoteric arguments? How many of the dedicated Christians will point to Spinoza-type arguments as the reasons for their commitment to Christianity?
What you said about Spinoza makes me wonder if I have been mistaken in assuming your views were essentially in line with most creationists. When you said
… Start with Spinoza: If you have it, it is a product of the universe. IOW, if the universe can't give it, you can't have it. <bolding in original>
Doesn’t that force God to be a product of, not a cause of, the universe?
… Spinoza and Einstein who held Spinoza in esteem, were brilliant this time. They nailed it. They really did.
Though I know rather little about Spinoza, I am somewhat familiar with Einstein’s views on God and Christianity and the Bible. And unless your information is wildly at variance with mine, if Einstein really “nailed it”, then Christianity is dead in the water.