The triumph of the scientific method (SM) is often presented as an empirical fact of practical result. In other words, the success of the method along with its many triumphs paved the way for its near universal acclaim and acceptance. The historical record, however, does not support such a view. In fact, it is a myth.

First, SM is much older than its “savvy new kid on the block” reputation. SM far predates its modern incarnation and occurred in regions outside the typical Western Enlightenment (i.e., India, China, the Arabian peninsula, etc.) a false narrative upon which the myth heavily depends. There is nothing especially new about the new SM. Mathematics, the sturdy framework upon which it would make its daily bread, was always there. Maybe the math got better? Perhaps, but the old math wasn’t especially bad and quite a lot of it was especially good. In truth, SM existed side by side with several other methods of truth-seeking. In a world raised to think of the world as a fierce competition over scarce resources (and truth the scarcest resource of them all), well then, to the victor goes the spoils has a certain intellectual appeal. It is much harder to see a world in which science and religion (Theism, actually) weren’t always waging a Battle Royale and were often viewed as pursuing complimentary paths.

Second, the triumph of SM cannot be dissociated from the larger historical context, a complex set of social, economic, and political processes taking place in a variety of arenas that for convenience sake I will call the process of secularization. The Enlightenment had its supporters and detractors. It came in fits and starts. This is the uneven road upon which the triumph of SM came about. A road not preordained to success is one we can easily imagine ending in defeat.

Regardless of how it occurred, SM eventually triumphed while Theism went the way of phlogiston. But is important to keep the historical context in mind as it helps explains why Spinoza and his Third Way is often overlooked or dismissed. He falls uncomfortably between Medieval philosophy and the robust, mature era of the Enlightenment where success seemed certain and a new world within striking distance. After all, Theism and its revealed truths were exiting the stage. Isn’t Spinoza simply attempting to smuggle the old world back in with the new? It is a common criticism of Spinoza that is (oddly) both on-point and widely off-the-mark. But more on this later.

What do I mean by a Third Way? A way to what? A way back to God.

To summarize: The First Way, Theism, became an intellectual dead end. Henceforth, there is no valid reason to believe in a providential divine being or God as an active participant in the unfolding of worldly events, perpetually updating, interceding, judging the world from afar based upon a predetermined ethos or plan. No supernatural causes are needed. The world could be explained by natural phenomenon alone.

The Second Way, a kind of enlightened agnosticism, was still possible, at least for awhile. Deism, the watchmaker God, had its moment in the sun. God winds the clock according to iron-clad natural laws and mathematical formulae and sets the world in motion. While the problem of evil becomes ever more acute, we can always find solace in the harmony of an all-encompassing Logos. Cynically, we can have our atheism and eat our spiritual cake too.

Deism survived well into the 19th century. Then Mr. Darwin taught us Natural Selection. Henceforth, Humanity after Darwin was left without a telos. Human beings are not the end result of some preconceived rigorous plan, but a brute and blunt object emerging from no rational choice, one of many blind avenues of possibility, a lucky (or unlucky, depending on your animal perspective) chance occurrence that may one day lose its fitness for survival. Next up: the ants and cockroaches!

The Third Way back to God. Is such a thing possible? Yes, if you adjust your perspective and temper your expectations, such a thing is the most natural of all conclusions. Here is the mantra, the key to unlocking Spinoza’s intrepid formulae, the Deus, sive Natura, should you want to proceed: God is not the answer. God is the question. The true replacement of Theism is the God Question.

Bear this mantra in mind as it is worth repeating. God is the question, not the answer. It is natural for the mind to seek death, finality, resolution, telos, an end point in the contingency of all things. But in truth, things are not an end in themselves. Proof? The quintillion electrons inside my body are exactly the same as the quintillion inside yours, exactly the same as the even more mind boggling number of electrons inside planets and stars. Not copies. Exactly the same. Any difference, and they would cease to be electrons. This is an insight that must not be passed over lightly or treated as of no special importance. It is a critical piece in grasping reality. It implies that you are not the lonely little particle floating at the edge of the universe, but the compound of something larger. This truth is sometimes glimpsed, but lost in its reification. Memory deceives us by separating space and time into distinct frames of reference, an illusion.

It is better to start not with what is known or thought to be, but what it is not. The Deus, sive Natura is not a pantheism. This is not a reductive substitution, i.e., God = Nature. This is the heart of the matter. Let us avoid talk of substance vs. attributes which aren’t relevant to modern treatments of Spinoza. Let us save Spinoza from the accidental inheritance of his contemporary metaphysics and rehabilitate the core insight into a world that has learned much more since his time. What is going on here? What to make of this sive, this or? Is it an either/or? Are we left with a choice? God or Nature? Again, this is not a substitution or an equivocal sleight of hand, call it two things and voila! Problem solved! Is it a dualism? Yes, but not an ugly one, not a doubling of the world, but a deeper unification, a symmetry, that is at play.

Symmetry forces to the surface something that appears at first blush as merely accidental. An unlikely fortuitous set of circumstances are revealed to be aligned in such a way that no other predicted pattern is possible. It must be so. Why? Symmetry.

In Spinozan Symmetry, emergence and transcendence are commensurable, interchangeable. The crucial element is invariance, an unchanged transformation, the mapping of an object unto itself, the harmonizing of different elements into a unified whole. Spinoza is grappling with the problem of symmetry and even attempting to give it mathematical and logical rigor through the remnants of a medieval metaphysics.

“(Ip17s1): All things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles.”

“(Ip29): In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.”

“(Ip33): Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced.”

“The existence of the world is, thus, mathematically necessary. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Here is the crucial point. If you attempt to reconcile the God Question, answer it by substitution (Q: What is God? A: Nature.) then you have lost the thread. We are not calling it two things. The two things are essential domains of an underlying unification. Symmetry forces us to admit the inseparable, intractable nature of the problem. God is not a substance, not a will, a self-creating entity, but a Universal, immanent reality, proceeding by necessity. The God Problem.