Baruch Spinoza (via wikipedia)When Albert Einstein was asked by the New Yorker Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein "Do you believe in God?", his answer was, "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher who had so strongly influenced Einstein's philosophical and religious views, was born in Amsterdam 375 years ago today, on November 24, 1632, the son of Jewish refugees from Portugal. His conviction based on his studies of Renaissance philosophers, and especially of the writings of Descartes, brought him in conflict with the Amsterdam Jewish community, who expelled him in 1656. Earning his living as a lensmaker for microscopes, glasses and telescopes - a booming industry at the time - he could continue his studies, and while his way of life was very modest, he soon gained a reputation as quite a radical thinker. In his posthumously published Ethics, he tried to present his philosophical reasoning "in geometrical order", in a rigourous way modelled after Euclid's Elements. Spinoza was convinced that God exists in everything in nature, a pantheism that was soon interpreted as plain atheism.
If you want to know more about Spinoza than I can tell you, good starting points on the web are the biographies at wikipedia and the SEP, the BBC Radio 4 "In Our Time" program on Spinoza, and the collection of links "Studia Spinoziana" I've found via the Spinoza Institute.