The common view that God could refrain from producing what follows from his nature is absurd; denying necessary production is like denying that a triangle’s interior angles equal two right angles.

By Baruch Spinoza, from Ethics

Key Arguments

  • If effects follow necessarily from a cause, then positing that from a given cause no effect should follow is absurd within Spinoza’s axiomatic causal necessity
  • Comparative analogy: making divine production contingent would be like making necessary geometrical truths contingent
  • This preserves divine power more perfectly than the view that God arbitrarily withholds effects, which would imply unrealized infinite possibilities and a limitation of power

Source Quotes

Coroll. i.), and acts by the sole necessity of his own nature, wherefore God is (by Def. vii.) the sole free cause. Q.E.D. Note.—Others think that God is a free cause, because he can, as they think, bring it about, that those things which we have said follow from his nature—that is, which are in his power, should not come to pass, or should not be produced by him. But this is the same as if they said, that God could bring it about, that it should follow from the nature of a triangle that its three interior angles should not be equal to two right angles; or that from a given cause no effect should follow, which is absurd.
Q.E.D. Note.—Others think that God is a free cause, because he can, as they think, bring it about, that those things which we have said follow from his nature—that is, which are in his power, should not come to pass, or should not be produced by him. But this is the same as if they said, that God could bring it about, that it should follow from the nature of a triangle that its three interior angles should not be equal to two right angles; or that from a given cause no effect should follow, which is absurd. Moreover, I will show below, without the aid of this proposition, that neither intellect nor will appertain to God's nature.

Key Concepts

  • they think, bring it about, that those things which we have said follow from his nature—that is, which are in his power, should not come to pass
  • the same as if they said, that God could bring it about, that it should follow from the nature of a triangle that its three interior angles should not be equal to two right angles; or that from a given cause no effect should follow, which is absurd.

Context

Ethics I, PROPOSITIONS, lines 304–435: Note after Corollary II critiquing voluntarist conceptions of divine freedom