Then it occurred to me that a play would be even better. I had known about the meeting between Leibniz and Spinoza, but that was when I got the idea that it would make a great subject for a novel. I happened to be passing through Holland in the mid-90s, and I was re-reading Spinoza. How did you come to this particular story about the relationship between these two philosophers? Depending how you look at it, you could say that God ended up on one side or the other – or he got lost in the shuffle. So thinkers of the time asked themselves, who is God? And what does he do? Leibniz and Spinoza came up with some very radical – and radically different – answers to these questions. The emergence of a scientific understanding of the world at the time made it impossible for many people to believe in the old miracle-working deity who lived on a mountain or in the clouds. Actually, it was kind of an existential crisis. But here’s the teaser: God underwent a major personality change in the late seventeenth century. Of course, I wouldn’t want to give away the plot to my book. Let’s start with the punch-line: So what is the fate of God in the modern world?
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