Most Western traditions picture God as a creator, a being separate from the world He made. The 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza saw things differently. He argued that there isn't a creator and a creation. Instead, there is only one single, all-encompassing reality.

This idea is called monism, from the Greek word monos, meaning 'one.' For Spinoza, everything in existence—from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy, from a fleeting thought to the laws of physics—is part of one unified substance. And this one substance, he said, is God.

When Spinoza says “God, or Nature,” he means it literally. He’s not just being poetic. God isn't a person-like being who lives outside of nature, pulling strings. God is nature. The universe itself is divine. A mountain isn’t a thing God made; it's a part of God. Your mind isn't a soul given to you by God; it's a part of God's thought.

Think of the ocean and its waves. A wave isn't a separate thing created by the ocean. It's a temporary shape that the ocean itself takes. In the same way, every individual thing and person is just a temporary mode, or expression, of the single substance that is God/Nature.

Spinoza defined God as a substance with infinite attributes. An attribute is an essential quality or a fundamental way of understanding this single substance. While God/Nature has an infinite number of these attributes, human beings can only perceive two of them: thought and extension.

• Extension is the physical world. It’s everything that takes up space, from a grain of sand to a star. It's the world of bodies, matter, and energy.
• Thought is the non-physical world. It's the realm of ideas, consciousness, and mind.

Crucially, these are not two separate realities, as the philosopher René Descartes had argued. Spinoza saw them as two sides of the same coin. They are two different perspectives on the one and only substance. Every event in the physical world (extension) has a corresponding idea in the mental world (thought), because they are ultimately the same thing, just expressed in different ways.

This leads to some profound implications. If God is Nature, then God isn't a judge who hands out rewards and punishments. Nature operates according to its own immutable laws, and so does God. Miracles, in the traditional sense, are impossible, because that would mean God/Nature is violating its own being.

Furthermore, everything that happens is a necessary part of the whole. There is no good or evil from the perspective of the universe itself, only causes and effects unfolding according to the laws of nature.

This radical idea redefines what it means to be spiritual. For Spinoza, a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all things through the laws of nature is the path to a kind of intellectual love of God.