Baruch Spinoza's Ontological Argument

In the Seventeenth Century many philosophers were enlightening the world with their various views and ontological arguments. Baruch Spinoza was no different. Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam and grew up in a Jewish community where he was led to be a rabbi. At the age of twenty-four he was banned from his community for his radical views and was also later banned from a Christian community for those same opinions (Nadler, “Baruch Spinoza”). Spinoza came to be influenced and well educated in other Empiricists and Rationalists like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes. However, it was Spinoza’s ontological argument that seemed the most profound, or absurd, of them all and this is what set him apart from the rest of the philosophers of his time. Baruch Spinoza’s …show more content…
In Proposition Twenty-Two of Part One, Spinoza states “whatever follows from some attribute of God, insofar as the attribute is modified by a modification that exists necessarily and as infinite through some attribute, must also exist both necessarily and as infinite” (Spinoza 154). As long as the attribute that the mode follows from is infinite, then that mode must also be infinite. This leads to the definition of a mode, which is “the affections of substance, that is, that which is in something else and is conceived through something else” (Spinoza 144). This leads into Proposition Twenty-Three where Spinoza states that “Every mode which exists necessarily and as infinite must have necessarily followed either from the absolute nature of some attribute of God or from some attribute modified by a modification which exists necessarily and as infinite” (Spinoza 155). Spinoza is saying that a mode must be conceived only through God and exists necessarily and infinitely through God. Therefore, human beings and everything that exists are just different modes of God and exist through