Catalyst for Controversy

"I am not a common atheist; I am an atheist who loves God."— Paul Carus , "The God of Science," 1904 In the summer of 1880, while teaching at the military academy of the Royal Corps of Cadets of Saxony in Dresden, Paul Carus published a brief pamphlet denying the literal truth of scripture and describing the Bible as a great literary work comparable to the Odyssey . This unremarkable document was Carus’s first step in a wide-ranging intellectual voyage in which he traversed philosophy, science,