Identifying God with the whole of reality, he has to agree with the atheist when the latter insists that reality cannot be divided into a part which is God and one which is non-God – both of them deny an effective contrast.89 But if God cannot be isolated from anything else, it is impossible to say He ‘exists’ in any sense an ordinary person can grasp. Spinoza was saying: ‘There is no God in the sense we have always understood the word.’ To most people that is atheism.
