 Ad nauseam as well? Spinoza has little sympathy with the traditional monotheistic idea that God created the world ex nihilo. There is no true “in the beginning” style cosmogony, according to Spinoza. If our present universe can be traced back to the Big Bang, there had to be a state prior to the Big Bang that caused the Big Bang, and a state prior to that, and so on. Is this infinite chain of finite causes intelligible? Prima facie, there is no PSR violation. For every particular finite object, there is a sufficient reason for its existence and characteristics in terms of its prior finite causes. Each finite object follows from and is thus explained by the prior state of the world, whose constituents are explained by a yet prior state, and so on. If that is all Spinoza intended to say about the modal status of finite things, then one could read his fiery denials of contingency as defenses of mere causal determinism and not full-blown necessitarianism.