A remarkable fact about humanity is that virtually every culture that has ever existed has worshiped one or more gods. And although religious affiliation is now on the decline, more people than not continue to believe in an all-powerful cosmic creator. The question is: Why?
Two possibilities exist: one, that God is real, and two, that psychological mechanisms common to humanity generate the persistent illusion of divinity. Many people believe the former; Francis Bacon gave us the tools to decipher the latter.
Cognitive psychology truly begins in the 17th century with the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon. Prior to him, few thinkers had seriously considered the myriad ways the mind falls into its own traps—producing volumes upon volumes of useless philosophy and religion. “The subtlety of nature far surpasses the subtlety of sense and intellect,” Bacon wrote, “so that men’s fine meditations, speculations and endless discussions are quite insane, except that there is no one who notices.”
Bacon was among the first to notice. He saw that ancient thinkers, “like spiders, spin webs out of their own substance,” entangling themselves in utter nonsense dressed up in the garb of syllogisms. For progress to be made, someone had to untangle the webs, and expose the biases—or Idols of the Mind—that led one’s thinking astray. Bacon set out to do just that.
In Book 1 of his masterpiece, the New Organon, Bacon identified four groups of biases (or Idols) that reliably cause errors in judgment. These ranged from biases common to humanity itself (Idols of the Tribe) to biases that stem from personality and upbringing (Idols of the Cave), the misuse or misunderstanding of language (Idols of the Marketplace), and the blind acceptance of ideologies based on authority or tradition (Idols of the Theater).
Taken together, the four Idols seriously distort our perception of reality. “The human understanding,” Bacon wrote, “is like an uneven mirror receiving rays from things and merging its own nature with the nature of things, which thus distorts and corrupts it.” Until these distortions were cleared away—particularly the illusions of religion—there could be no hope for human progress.
Yet Bacon was no atheist (or openly, at least), and considering the intellectual climate of the time, we shouldn’t expect otherwise. He maintained his belief in God by erecting a wall of separation between religion and science—a wall that neither domain could penetrate. But his religion was no threat; he didn’t believe God or scripture had any place in the real world of science. And in any case, Bacon gifted to all future atheists the tools needed to explain religious belief in naturalistic terms—without appealing to divine revelation.
Let’s then examine these tools—and how the Idols of the Mind explain why the God delusion is so prominent in our species.
The Idols of the Mind and the Origin of Religion
Let’s begin with the Idols of the Tribe, which are common to humanity and thus applicable to every believer who has ever lived (or ever will). These Idols are the most important, as they form the foundation of the psychology of religion—and go a long way towards explaining why belief in God is so persistent. Here’s how Bacon introduces them:
The human understanding from its own peculiar nature willingly supposes a greater order and regularity in things than it finds, and though there are many things in nature which are unique and full of disparities, it invents parallels and correspondences and non-existent connections.
This remarkably prescient passage anticipates what we now know to be the phenomenon of patternicity, which lies at the very foundation of the God delusion, and is worth exploring a bit further.
In 2008, the skeptic and historian of science Michael Shermer coined the term patternicity—or the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Building on the work of previous thinkers like Stewart Elliott Guthrie—who explored the anthropology and cognitive science of religion—Shermer proposed that our minds are primed, via evolution, to detect patterns and to avoid potentially dangerous, if ambiguous, situations.
“Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much,” Shermer wrote, “but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.” We’re wired, then, to be a bit paranoid, and, as a result, to over-detect agency in the environment. You don’t have to be trained to see or hear imaginary things; this is your default state. On the contrary, you have to be trained out of what is termed “hyperactive agency detection.”
It turns out to be very difficult to turn this pattern-recognition machinery off. The result is the misattribution of agency to a host of natural events and ambiguous noises, images, feelings, and altered states of consciousness (dreams, hallucinations, mental disorders). This is why we see faces in the clouds and the Virgin Mary on toast. And when this individual bias scales up culturally, the result is religion.
What’s more, once we arrive at our beliefs—however misguided they are—we hold onto them with a tight grip. We actively search for evidence that supports our beliefs while rejecting or ignoring any evidence to the contrary. This tendency to “cherry-pick” data means that we can make virtually any belief seem credible. As Bacon wrote:
Once a man’s understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first conceptions.
What Bacon is describing—more than 400 years ago—is confirmation bias: humanity’s most pernicious prejudice. It trips up otherwise intelligent minds to this very day, and it leads to something even more detrimental to rationality. As Bacon wrote:
So when someone was shown a votive tablet in a temple dedicated, in fulfilment of a vow, by some men who had escaped the danger of shipwreck, and was pressed to say whether he would now recognise the divinity of the gods, he made a good reply when he retorted: “Where are the offerings of those who made vows and perished?”
Bacon is quoting here Western history’s first recorded atheist—Diagoras of Melos. Diagoras, in fact, was the first to uncover this crucial cognitive error: survivorship bias. Whether the topic is astrology, dreams, omens, or divine judgements, people “notice the results when they are fulfilled, but ignore and overlook them when they fail, though they do fail more often than not,” as Bacon explained. If we placed as much stock, for example, in the individuals who prayed and yet perished—as we did to the ones who happened to survive—we might see that the survivors were not saved by God at all, but by the saving grace of statistics.
Patternicity. Confirmation bias. Survivorship bias. These Idols of the Tribe collectively form the holy trinity of delusionary religious thinking. They compel us to overdetect patterns in nature, assign agency to them, and then seek confirmatory evidence to support these flimsy connections. Throw in the fear of death, and you have the perfect recipe for religious faith. And Bacon knew all of this four centuries ago.
But he dug even deeper, introducing the Idols of the Cave, which made this all a bit more personal:
The idols of the cave are the illusions of the individual man. For (apart from the aberrations of human nature in general) each man has a kind of individual cave or cavern which fragments and distorts the light of nature. This may happen either because of the unique and particular nature of each man; or because of his upbringing and the company he keeps; or because of his reading of books and the authority of those whom he respects and admires; or because of the different impressions things make on different minds, preoccupied and prejudiced perhaps, or calm and detached, and so on. The evident consequence is that the human spirit (in its different dispositions in different men) is a variable thing, quite irregular, almost haphazard. Heraclitus well said that men seek knowledge in lesser, private worlds, not in the great or common world.
The Idols of the Tribe compel us to believe in God; the Idols of the Cave tell us which God to believe in. In fact, a study by Yahya A. Sharif shows that “individual religious affiliation is predominantly a function of socio-cultural and geographical contingency rather than the outcome of independent, evidence-based inquiry.” The upshot is that you could predict someone’s religion, with a very high degree of accuracy, knowing only where they were born.
It should come as no surprise, then, that someone growing up in Afghanistan—with a Muslim population approaching 100 percent—becomes Muslim, whereas someone raised in Romania—one of the most Christianized countries in Europe—turns out Christian. We are all, more or less, the products of our own personal caves.
We are also the products of the language we use. The Idols of the Marketplace are cognitive distortions stemming from the careless use of words and phrases. “Men associate through talk; and words are chosen to suit the understanding of the common people. And thus a poor and unskilful code of words incredibly obstructs the understanding,” Bacon wrote. “Plainly words do violence to the understanding, and confuse everything; and betray men into countless empty disputes and fictions.”
The word “God” itself may be one such Idol. Do we even know what we mean when we use it? Ordinarily, the words we use correspond to some aspect of reality, however obliquely. If I say, for example, that the Eiffel tower is in Paris, you could fly to France and confirm it with your own eyes. But if I tell you that God exists, how exactly are you supposed to confirm or deny this?
The fluidity of language makes matters worse. If I were to keep moving the goalpost to avoid refutation—by defining God as invisible, undetectable, and incorporeal—then would I actually be saying anything of substance at all? In this sense, the assertion that God exists becomes not false, but meaningless. A simple Idol of the Marketplace.
Meaningless statements that stir the emotions have their place, of course, in the realms of myth and fiction. These are the Idols of the Theater: “For all the philosophies that men have learned or devised,” Bacon wrote, “are…so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds.” The only problem is when we forget they’re inventions.
These fabricated realities are easily identified: “Narratives made up for the stage are neater and more elegant than true stories from history,” Bacon wrote, “and are the sort of thing people prefer.” Our love of a good story, then, is another trap that compels us to believe the unbelievable.
We then become masters of imaginary worlds. Yet as Bacon warned, “it is absolutely clear that if you run the wrong way, the better and faster you are, the more you go astray.” Having deep and impressive knowledge of a fictional world does not make that world any less fictional. Reality is often less dramatic than fantasy, but it at least has the advantage of being real. Part of intellectual maturity is attuning the mind to find meaning and truth in the ordinary world as it actually exists.
Let’s be clear though: Bacon’s warning cuts both ways. The Idols do not afflict only the religious mind, but the skeptical one as well. Atheists are no less vulnerable to vanity, confirmation bias, tribal thinking, or ideological theater. The lesson is not that unbelief guarantees truth, but that intellectual humility and disciplined inquiry are necessary for everyone. We all must do battle with the Idols.
Overcoming the Idols of the Mind
“The mind leaps to generalities so that it can rest; it only takes it a little while to get tired of experience.” This turning away from experience—and from induction and science—leads one straight into the distorting grip of the Idols. The mind left to its own devices commits predictable errors: attributing agency to natural phenomena, mistaking wishful thinking for evidence, reinforcing its own prejudices through confirmation bias, obscuring meaning behind vague or empty language, and surrendering critical judgment to emotionally compelling stories. These are the perennial enemies of the human mind, and overcoming them is the first prerequisite to intellectual growth.
Bacon himself offered a powerful remedy to combat the Idols at their core: “And in general every student of nature must hold in suspicion whatever most captures and holds his understanding.” In this deceptively simple advice lies the antidote to confirmation bias. The beliefs that grip us most strongly—often in religion and politics—are precisely the beliefs we should examine with the greatest skepticism.
And so we are left with a question that deserves more than a passing moment of reflection: Is the God of your religion truly real, or instead a predictable product of the Idols of the Mind—born not from evidence, but from the hidden frailties of human cognition itself?
References
Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Translated by Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Boissonneault, Ryan. “The First Atheist: Diagoras of Melos and the Psychology of Superstition.” Fighting the Gods, April 7, 2026. https://fightingthegods.com/the-first-atheist-diagoras-of-melos-and-the-psychology-of-superstition/.
Law, Stephen. “Ayer on Religious Language.” Think 22, no. 63 (Spring 2023): 63–66. https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/article/ayer-on-religious-language/.
Sharif, Yahya A. “The Geography of Belief: Religious Affiliation as a Function of Birth, Socio-Psychological Imprinting, and Its Implications for Truth Claims.” SSRN, September 30, 2025. https://ssrn.com/abstract=5549164.
Shermer, Michael. “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise.” Scientific American, December 1, 2008. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/