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God: A Biography, by Jack Miles (Knopf 409pp., $27.50)

SPINOZA sought gently to deliver his readers from the superstition that Moses had to ascend Mount Sinai in order to get closer to God. The gesture might have been useful for Moses, as a bit of theater, to make an impression on the minds of his followers. But as Spinoza remarked, God would, have been no less near to Moses on the plain than in the heights. God would have heard him quite as well, for God did not suffer from diminished hearing, or from auditory nerves strained by age. With a comparable certitude, Albert Einstein was convinced that there was a design in the universe, that God did not play at dice. In either case, the conviction was rooted in an understanding of the character or nature of God, an understanding that could not be found exactly in the pages of the Bible. And yet, perhaps it could: Might it be that Spinoza and Einstein had simply filled in the ellipses marked off in the Bible? Might they have allied their imagination with the text, and drawn their inferences from the record that had been set down of the words and works of God?

About the Author

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding.

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God: A Biography, by Jack Miles (Knopf 409pp., $27.50)

SPINOZA sought gently to deliver his readers from the superstition that Moses had to ascend Mount Sinai in order to get closer to God. The gesture might have been useful for Moses, as a bit of theater, to make an impression on the minds of his followers. But as Spinoza remarked, God would, have been no less near to Moses on the plain than in the heights. God would have heard him quite as well, for God did not suffer from diminished hearing, or from auditory nerves strained by age. With a comparable certitude, Albert Einstein was convinced that there was a design in the universe, that God did not play at dice. In either case, the conviction was rooted in an understanding of the character or nature of God, an understanding that could not be found exactly in the pages of the Bible. And yet, perhaps it could: Might it be that Spinoza and Einstein had simply filled in the ellipses marked off in the Bible? Might they have allied their imagination with the text, and drawn their inferences from the record that had been set down of the words and works of God?