ABSTRACT
This chapter situates John Dewey's type of religious naturalism within the course of nineteenth-century philosophy of religion. His intellectual genealogy from Herder and Schelling through Goethe, Coleridge, and Trendelenburg infused his university years by way of the idealisms of James Marsh and George Morris. Religious naturalism, generally speaking, offers some sort of naturalism compatible with religiosity. Dewey's variety of naturalism can accommodate natural territories suitably hospitable for, and worthy of, religious attitudes and activities. In Dewey's Psychology, religion guides the growth of the free individual within God's processes. During Dewey's early period, he repeatedly encountered and absorbed German organicism, originating in Herder and Schelling. Dewey's recollection is significant because that Aristotelian organicism was essential to German idealism's revolt against dualism, whether in the form of empiricism, materialism, or Kantianism. Dewey's organicism allowed him to deny key assumptions framing that idealist trilemma: God possesses all powers; God possesses all substantiality; and causation is a necessary relation.
