Spinoza’s way of understanding the mind, freedom in relation to God, and freedom in relation to people, is not only different than Descartes, it is also more logical, as well as successful at deflecting problems which arose from Descartes’s beliefs concerning this issue. This is because, to Spinoza, the immaterial mind is nothing more than a mode of God’s attribute of thought, and just as the body follows a set pattern of motions, which ultimately derive from God’s essence expressed under the attribute of extension, ideas also follow an order, which by necessity parallel the order of things. 71 This is because the mind’s idea of the body is adequate insofar as one needs to be self-aware of their body, in order to persevere in who they are by nature at any given time. 72 Hence, the immaterial mind is not free, rather it is compelled because it needs the body in order to be aware of how outside affects, affect it. 73 Furthermore, to Spinoza God is Nature, and since God does not exists outside of the natural order, Spinoza, I believe, rightfully does away with the distinction Descartes makes between it and the universe. 74

Thus, the laws of nature can be understood as being of God’s essence, and if God were to intervene in that order, God would be defying its own nature, which both philosophers agree is illogical, and something such as miracles, or exceptions to nature’s rules, as Descartes understood them, are to Spinoza, an impossibility. 75 Also, by doing away with this distinction, between God, and nature, Spinoza’s idea of God, can be understood as the only substance that is uncompelled and whose essence includes being the laws of the universe, which, in turn, bypasses Descartes’s problem of how God, and nature, could interact if they are distinct. Therefore, one can infer that to Spinoza, nothing other than God, or Nature, is undetermined, since all things derive from its order, and thus, God’s nature is not that of a free creator, rather it is that of a free cause which all beings are dependent on in all ways. 76