The Idea of God

The Idea of God is one of Paul Carus’s many philosophical works, written for a general American readership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carus was a German born American philosopher and prolific author, best remembered as the long time editor of the Open Court Publishing Company and of the journals The Open Court and The Monist. His philosophical work emphasized the integration of religious and scientific thought, and The Idea of God fits squarely into the central project of his philosophical career.

The idea of God as a philosophical subject has a long history in Western thought, with major treatments going back at least to the medieval scholastic tradition and continuing through the early modern philosophical engagements of figures like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. Carus’s contribution to this long tradition takes up the central question of what the idea of God actually means, what role it plays in human thought and culture, and how the various religious and philosophical traditions have understood the concept across different historical periods and intellectual contexts.

Carus’s particular philosophical position was a kind of monistic religion of science, an attempt to integrate the findings of contemporary natural science with the religious sensibility that he believed remained essential to human life. The Idea of God works through this integration by showing how the philosophical and theological tradition’s various conceptions of God can be reframed in ways that are compatible with what nineteenth century natural science had discovered about the physical and biological world. Carus’s framework involves a careful distinction between the literal anthropomorphic conceptions of God that he saw in popular religion and the more philosophical conception that he believed could be sustained on rigorous intellectual grounds.

The book is in the formal nineteenth century philosophical style, dense by modern standards but carefully constructed for the educated general readership that Open Court’s publications served. Carus draws on classical and modern philosophical sources, on the history of religion, and on contemporary scientific developments to make his case, with the comparative engagement that was his signature across his many books on religious and philosophical topics.

For students of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American philosophy, of the long history of philosophical theism, or of the wider intellectual culture of the period when American thought was working through the relationship between traditional religion and the new natural sciences, The Idea of God is worth knowing. Carus’s books are now historical artifacts more than living philosophical interventions, but they remain valuable as primary sources from a particular moment in American intellectual history.