i suspect hegel imagines he needs the concept of god -- or the "world soul" -- because he wants awareness ultimately to permeate all of substance as a totality of self-knowledge, which the entire collected self-knowledge of mortals might not add up to: hegelians like marx did indeed dispense with this for all practical purposes

dewey was also a hegelian to start with: and in fact there's a particular hegelian reading of marx which reminds me a lot of pragmatism, though it's not one that has much sway in actually existing marxist political movements...