Spinoza and Contingency

In his Ethics, Spinoza makes a radical leap, certainly the most radical we have seen thus far in modern thought. He proposes that everything that exists is really only a mode of one substance, God, and that God is really indistinguishable from nature. God is not personal in any sense familiar to adherents of the Abrahamic religions. Instead, Spinoza presents a sort of naturalistic pantheism. All bodies and all minds are modes of an indivisible substance, as per Proposition 15 of the Ethics. If everything is part of this necessary and infinite substance, the conclusion that follows is that contingency does not exist. All modes flow from the eternal nature, and are thus necessary. To say that things could be any different than they are would be to say that there could be another nature or attribute to God, which is to say that there was another God. As Spinoza says in Proposition 33, this is an absurdity, and he attributes our perception of contingency to a lack of knowledge. As there is only one substance, and that substance is necessary, no contingency can exist within that substance.