Uploaded May 2008 | Updated September 2026, 37 minutes ago

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Steven Nadler, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gives a talk on Baruch Spinoza at Beyond Belief 2006, touching on Spinoza's conception of God and morality.

Spinoza heavily influenced Einstein's beliefs about God and ethics. He said:
'It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropomorphic concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near to those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem — the most important of all human problems.'

Links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/nadler/

Part 2:
youtube.com/watch?v=O_wLDXI9cIs