Being one of the first pantheists, seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza believed that God was Nature itself. In his Ethics, Spinoza argued that God was made of the infinite number of things in the universe, i.e., all natural things: not that He was a body that existed outside the universe, as the Catholic Church had people believe.
Natural Selection is a term Darwin gave to the evolutionary phenomenon that allows an organism to adapt to a change of environment. An environment is a setting of Nature, and if we are to believe God and Nature are interchangeable, as Spinoza did, then we must believe that God is what creates the changes needed for an organism to survive- changes such as the development of wings, camouflage, and horns. After reading about Darwin's ideas, Spinoza would have argued that everything an animal uses to survive was given to it by God, by Nature, by a metaphysical force that still retains the description of being natural, rational, and scientific. He might have even pointed out that natural selection can't really be a scientific term, since selection by definition is something that must involve a choice, and therefore consciousness. Yet somehow it became a scientific term, allowing nature to become the first (and possibly only) thing in the history of the universe to "select" something without requiring a form of consciousness.
By this reasoning, any so-called pantheist would probably accept that natural selection is God's way of creating an organism. I'd be interested in hearing their thoughts on the matter.
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