If Spinoza thought there's 'something out there,' then clearly he isn't an atheist. On the other hand, I think the idea of a God that doesn't know He exists is self-defeating, as someone who accepts the notion of a God that possesses all knowledge. So after thinking about it, I suppose Spinoza's position, while respectable, encounters many problems, like the ones you mentioned. So I'll agree with you that if there exists something equal to God, then the original belief in God makes very little practical sense, at least from a monotheistic viewpoint.
Not quite. He doesn't consider there to be something 'out there' at all but rather 'everywhere.'
Spinoza was probably as close to an atheist (the clues in the name) as you could possibly be. He wasn’t a theist. However if you mean Spinoza believed in a ‘god’ then that too is debatable, if I can explain. His ‘deus’ is unlike any god conceived by man and was the complete opposite of the providential god of the Jews and Christians. For him the deus
was the natural order; not set apart from it. Some would say he was pantheist; that his deus was the water, the sun, the air, the flowers and, had he known about it every spectrum of the sciences and every atom. And I guess that’s a very spiritual interpretation but it’s one that most atheists and agnostics would hold. For example, wonder is to be found in the fact that not only does the sun sustain life on earth, but nearly every atom on this planet in every living and non living thing is made up of the same material that formed the solar system and formed the sun and that this only happened because other stars blew up billions of years ago. And we can go back further and further to the very singularity; the defining point of all science, all energy, all matter and all time. Holding that view in Spinoza’s time would have seen me labelled as ‘pantheist.’
However the reason why Spinoza shouldn’t be considered pantheist (nor should I) is because while atheists and pantheists agree than on an ontological level there is nothing else to the world but nature, they would disagree when the pantheist insisted that the identification of a deus with nature makes it necessary to hold the psychological attitudes demanded by theism. Spinoza didn’t consider there to be anything ‘holy’ about nature (and neither would I) While nature can ‘awe’ we should not be in awe of it. As the stoics asserted nature is neither positive nor negative; it is what it is. Holding reverence or fear of nature will not influence it towards a kinder or harsher disposition. For Spinoza in fact worshipful awe is not an appropriate action to take before the deus; the key to discovering and experiencing deus/nature, for Spinoza, is philosophy (which he divides from theology) and science.