The Mind of God and the Works of Man

This intellectual history examines the philosophical relationship between divine and human agency across four centuries of Western thought, tracing how conceptions of God shaped understanding of human nature and capacities. Edward Craig analyzes the transition from a God-centered worldview in the seventeenth century to increasingly human-centered perspectives by the twentieth century, revealing how theological assumptions fundamentally structured philosophical anthropology and epistemology.

Craig begins with the seventeenth-century "Similarity Thesis," which posited that humans, created in God's image, possess faculties analogous to divine attributes. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz exemplified this approach, understanding human reason, will, and creative capacity as finite versions of infinite divine perfections. This theological framework grounded confidence in human cognitive abilities while maintaining clear hierarchical distinctions between creator and creature. The period's rationalism drew explicitly on assumptions about divine intellect to validate human knowledge claims.

The study then traces the gradual dissolution of this framework through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Craig demonstrates how Hume's skepticism and Kant's critical philosophy challenged the coherence of applying divine predicates to human faculties. The Romantic movement, particularly in German idealism, attempted to preserve spiritual meaning while rejecting traditional theistic metaphysics. Hegel's system represents a pivotal transformation, collapsing distinctions between divine and human consciousness through historical development.

Craig's analysis culminates in examining how twentieth-century philosophy largely abandoned explicit theological reference points while retaining secularized versions of earlier debates. Existentialism and analytical philosophy grapple with questions of meaning, agency, and knowledge that historically presumed theological contexts. The work illuminates how apparently secular philosophical problems often contain hidden theological genealogies.

The monograph contributes to understanding the incoherence-of-theism debate by demonstrating how philosophical critiques of divine attributes simultaneously undermined associated conceptions of human nature. Craig shows that rejecting traditional theism required reconceptualizing fundamental assumptions about consciousness, freedom, and rationality. His historical approach reveals that modern philosophical anthropology emerged through sustained engagement with theological questions rather than simple rejection of religious frameworks.

Through careful textual analysis and contextual reconstruction, Craig establishes that the "death of God" in Western philosophy entailed profound transformations in human self-understanding, suggesting that theological and anthropological questions remain more entangled than contemporary secular philosophy typically acknowledges.