Why God and Nature Are One

In this opening lecture of a series on Baruch Spinoza, Noa Lahav Ayalon sets the stage for one of philosophy's most ambitious projects: Ethics. She begins with Spinoza's life as a seventeenth-century Dutch thinker excommunicated from his Jewish community, then situates him within the scientific revolution and the era's crisis over what counts as truth. The lecture maps the divide between rationalists and empiricists, contrasting Spinoza's deductive, geometric method with Francis Bacon's inductive approach. Ayalon walks through the foundational architecture of Ethics: definitions, substance, attributes, and modes. She explains Spinoza's concept of causa sui, his collapse of God and nature into one, and his thoroughgoing determinism. The lecture also addresses a provocative question: why would a man accused of atheism write a book called Ethics? Spinoza, unlike religious traditions that simply issue commandments, insists on explaining the reasoning behind them, building toward a theory of salvation grounded in understanding rather than obedience.