“Since men find in themselves,” he writes, “and external to themselves, many things which are of no small assistance in obtaining what is to their advantage, as for example, the eyes for seeing, the teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for giving light, and so on, this has led them to regard all things in nature as means to their advantage. And knowing these means to have been discovered, not provided by themselves, they have made this a reason for believing that there is some one else who has provided them for their use. But as they had never had any information concerning the character of this being, they had to judge it from their own. Hence, they maintained that the gods direct all things with a view to man’s advantage, to lay men under obligation to themselves, and to be held in the highest honor; whence it has come to pass that each one has thought out for himself, according to his disposition, a different way of worshipping God, that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the service of his ... desire. But while they sought to show that nature does nothing uselessly (in other words nothing that is not to man’s advantage) they seem to have shown only that nature and gods and men are all equally mad.” And Spinoza seizes the opportunity to pay tribute to a respectable, well-worn theology: “Just see how far the thing has been carried! Among all useful things in nature they could not help finding a few harmful things, as tempests, earthquakes, diseases, etc. They maintained that these occurred because the gods were angry on account of injuries done them by men or on account of faults committed in their worship. And although experience daily contradicted this and showed by an infinity of instances that good and evil fall to the lot of the pious and of the impious indifferently, that did not make them abandon their inveterate prejudice. They found it easier to class these facts with other unknown things whose use they could not name and thus to retain their present and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and think out a new one. Hence they assumed that the judgment of the gods very far surpasses man’s power of comprehension.” This in itself, Spinoza concludes, would have been sufficient to hide the truth forever from mankind had not science, which looks into the why and not the wherefore of things, shown men a different standard of truth. The second paragraph in which he fulfils his promise to show the folly of the popular belief in a providence is pervaded by a dry humor: