The God Who Does Not Choose

Why Spinoza's God has no will, no preferences, and no personal intentions.

I.

The God of traditional theism is a person, or something very like one. He has a will. He makes decisions. He loves, judges, forgives, and punishes. He chose to create the world, chose a particular people, chose to reveal himself through prophets and scriptures. Spinoza's God does none of these things. It has no will, no preferences, no personal intentions. It does not choose, because choosing implies a moment before the choice when the outcome was undecided, and for God, nothing is undecided. Everything follows necessarily from the divine nature.

This is the most difficult aspect of Spinoza's theology for most readers to accept. A God without will seems like no God at all. But Spinoza would argue that a God with will is a God made in the image of man: a projection of human psychology onto the infinite, and a particularly crude one at that. Will implies desire. Desire implies lack. Lack implies imperfection. An infinite being cannot lack anything. Therefore, an infinite being cannot have a will in any sense that resembles the human.

II.

What, then, does God do? God does not "do" anything, if doing implies a deliberate action chosen from among alternatives. God simply is, and everything that exists follows from the divine nature with the same necessity that the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. God did not choose to create the world. The world follows necessarily from God as necessarily as the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees.

This is not a diminishment of God. It is a purification. The God who chooses is a God whose choices can be questioned, whose motives can be scrutinized, whose justice can be doubted. The God who simply is, whose nature produces all things necessarily, cannot be questioned, because there is no alternative to what is. The necessity of the divine nature is the ultimate ground of reality. It makes no sense to ask whether it could have been otherwise.

III.

The absence of divine will has profound implications for how we understand our own lives. If God does not choose, then nothing that happens to you was chosen for you. Your suffering was not sent as a test. Your success was not granted as a reward. The events of your life are the necessary consequences of the order of nature, operating through causes that can be understood but not personalized.

This is a hard doctrine, but it is also a liberating one. The person who believes that God is testing him carries the additional burden of interpreting the test. He asks: what is God trying to teach me? What did I do to deserve this? The questions are unanswerable, because they are based on a false premise. God is not trying to teach you anything. The event happened because of causes. Understand the causes, and you will understand the event. The theological interpretation adds nothing and often compounds the suffering with guilt and confusion.

IV.

The God who does not choose also transforms the nature of worship. You cannot pray to a God without will, because there is no one listening, no one who might grant or deny the request. What you can do is understand God, which for Spinoza means understanding the order of nature, the causal structure of reality. This understanding is not a substitute for worship. It is worship, in the only form that makes sense for an infinite being: the intellectual love of God, the joy that accompanies the mind's grasp of the eternal necessity of things.

This is not a cold, abstract exercise. It is the highest form of joy Spinoza recognizes, because it unites the mind with its cause, the finite mode with the infinite substance from which it flows. The intellectual love of God is not a feeling about a person. It is the mind's recognition of its own ground, and the joy that accompanies that recognition is the most durable joy a human being can experience.

V.

The God who does not choose may seem distant, but Spinoza would argue that the God who chooses is actually more distant, because a choosing God is a being separate from nature, standing outside it and intervening from beyond. Spinoza's God is not distant. It is immanent: present in everything, because everything is a mode of the divine substance. You are not separate from God, hoping for an audience. You are in God, as a wave is in the ocean, and understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.