Revelation and miracle in Spinoza

This thesis is about how revelation and miracle are understood in Spinoza's philosophy. As a rationalist philosopher in the 17th century, Spinoza accepted that God is a single substance. It is very important to determine how revelation and miracle are to be understood within such a conception of God. Therefore, the first part of the thesis includes discussions on Spinoza's understanding of God as inherent in what he created as a necessary being and whether he was pantheist or panentheist. As an important researcher and critic of religions in his time, Spinoza was directly interested in the understanding of revelation and miracle in sacred texts. In the second part of the thesis, the issue of revelation is addressed as a problem of knowledge and it is seen that the imagination of the prophets makes this revelation possible. It is also necessary to emphasize that it has a similarity with the Peripatetic tradition in this regard. According to Spinoza, God sent down revelation according to the temperament of each prophet. However, with his rationalist discourse, he draws attention to the fact that revelation is not a source of knowledge and that prophets can only be taken as examples in a moral sense. Spinoza's view of miracles is also different from the classical view. In this subject, which is discussed in the third section, it is seen that, according to Spinoza, miracles do not occur contrary to divine laws. According to him, natural events within divine law should be seen as miracles. Because miracles are not extraordinary events, but events that occur as a result of the cause-effect chain that God initially puts forward. Spinoza's universe has a deterministic structure. In conclusion, when we look at Spinoza's views on the subjects of God, revelation and miracles, we see that he deals with issues with a method that emphasizes reason and that he has an influence on himself and later on the history of thought. Keywords: Philosophy of Religion, Spinoza, God, Pantheism, Panentheism, Prophet, Revelation, Miracle.