Ah, we both love Spinoza, Alex.
I am reading his evidence that God exist not as nothing, but rather as an abstraction.
We can accept God, but we are forced to do that at the abstract level; there is no other option to accept God.
Spinoza can be read in various manners, so we should not be surprised if we interpret his thinking in different manners.
--
I am very much in favor of having our feet stand on the ground, our human minds included.
To jump straight to the biggest issue with matter, the Big Bang, I claim that we have the following knowledge:
1. Matter came into being some 13.8 billion years ago.
2. Energy does not get lost.
What we do not have, and I am sorry to say that many think we do have it, is the beginning of space, time, or energy. We have totally zero, zilch, nothing about the beginnings of them.
That means we have three realms to work in, and not just one as you claim Spinoza pronounced it:
1. The forever unknowable (though we do know that there was a prior, so we cannot call this out as nothing, because it helped cause the resulting outcome).
2. The one-time event (the Big Bang process itself).
3. The repeatable events (and this is what we like best in science).
Now, let's use these three realms and find out how God fits in with them.
1. We can place God, the original God, here without any problem, including our not knowing everything about God. We do know, however, that from God we ended up with the known results.
2. The one-time event declares how either God did something or how something happened to God.
Either way, we cannot have the original God will creation into existence because that is like Superman flying through the air because his arm is stretched out. Too silly to mention.
So, we either have the entirety of the Original God becoming the result, or we have parts of the original God becoming the results. I see no other alternatives, other than the silliness already mentioned.
3. If God became the entire result, then we can still declare God all there is, but now in multifaceted format. I personally do not like it much, because a 100% reality becoming a secondary and distinct 100% reality would ordinarily imply that the secondary reality would return to the original state, and would do so rather quickly, as in 15 minutes and not much longer.
So, I consider God ending up using parts of God to establish the results a far more plausible pathway. Yet that also means that while God may have retained some of its abilities, some will have gone forever.
That is basically the Broken Toy story.
1. Nothing of the toy was lost (Energy does not get lost), yet the toy is in tatters.
2. The special trick the toy was capable of performing is now gone, and it will never come back by itself.
So, if we envision the original state as energized and engaged throughout, then something happened to that state that ended up undermining itself. Its energy then moving in outward directions, becoming self-based to some extent.
With the Big Bang we have a one-time event in which (some) immaterial energy ended up transforming into material energy. We can see, following all matter moving in outward directions, how that original state is then undermined, no longer One.
I like it much that the signals of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation are stronger around galaxies than in mid-space where there are no galaxies. That tells me (though this is not per se a fully correct conclusion) how we exists in some kind of cocoon of immaterial energy that is floating outwardly together with us in the Milky Way. We are then on a very large island of energy, and we are not connected to any other energy in the universe.
Thank you, Alex, for taking this for a spin and see where the conversation landed. I am very glad you are with Spinoza, but as you can tell I need to have God existing at the abstract level only. A different word for God, more scientific in essence, would then be the word Energy instead of God. At that level, one can declare that Energy is the carrier of God, and all we need to do is look at the behavior of Energy to understand how there is more to reality than just the material outcomes in which we exist.
