Sophie's World

God is a persistent motif throughout Sophie’s World. It begins as a discussion of the nature of philosophy itself, where God is compared to a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. As Albert and Sophie discover the history of philosophy, they find ideas about the nature, purpose, and existence of God exist at all points in time. In ancient Athens, Plato’s world of ideas clashed with Aristotle’s categories of species. In the Hellenistic period and shortly after, established religions began to form. Christianity became the prominent religion and the point from which to measure one’s morality and choices in the Middle Ages, until the idea of God was once again rearranged in the Baroque period when Descartes pondered the separation of mind and matter. During the same time, Spinoza proposed that God existed as a creator but not as a “puppeteer” (244). In between was the Renaissance, in which God was viewed as one with all things, a “divine lineage in mortal guise” (185). In the Enlightenment, Kant proposed that while God may exist, it could never be known one from a human perspective. Romantics had unique views of God, and Schelling believed God existed within all things as a great “world spirit” (346).