In 2010, the Pew Research Group conducted a comprehensive demographic study—including more than 230 countries and territories—that revealed that more than 8 out of 10 people identify with some religious group. While a few religions don’t recognize a god—and some nonaffiliated individuals believe in god nonetheless—we can take the estimate of 80 percent as a representative measure of worldwide belief in some kind of god.
For the atheist, this poses a bit of a problem. Not in the sense that it provides any sort of evidence for God’s existence—that would be committing the bandwagon fallacy—but in the sense that an explanation is needed as to why so many people continue to believe in something that, according to the atheist, almost certainly doesn’t exist.
The first systematic attempt at an answer came from the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Drawing on ideas anticipated by Xenophanes, Diagoras, and Francis Bacon, Hobbes argued that belief in God can be explained entirely in psychological terms—as a product, not of divine revelation, but of the fear and ignorance common to the human condition.
Thomas Hobbes—the materialist philosopher better known for his works in political philosophy—is an underappreciated pioneer in the psychology of religion, and did much to plant the seeds of future atheism. In Chapter XII of his masterpiece Leviathan, Hobbes laid the foundation for understanding religion in fully naturalistic terms—and how those in power manipulate human gullibility.
Hobbes may or may not have been an atheist himself. Good arguments can be made either way. But even if Hobbes confined his criticism to pagan religions while exempting Christianity, we need not follow his example. Christianity, from our perspective, is just one more manifestation of the psychological processes—of which Hobbes so cleverly exposed—that spawn all religions. As Stephen Henry Roberts once said, “When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” In dismantling the pagan gods, Hobbes unwittingly (or wittingly) forged the case against his own.
Hobbes knew, as a political theorist and proto-psychologist, that the historical proliferation of gods must have a psychological component. “Seeing there are no signs nor fruit of religion but in man only,” Hobbes wrote, “there is no cause to doubt but that the seed of religion is also only in man; and consisteth in some peculiar quality, or at least in some eminent degree thereof, not to be found in other living creatures.”
This “seed of religion,” buried deep within the human psyche, takes countless forms. As Hobbes observed, people invent “as many gods as there be men that feign them.” Yet beneath this bewildering diversity lies a common origin. Hobbes argued that every religion ultimately springs from four uniquely human mental phenomena:
And in these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion.
In other words, humans invent invisible beings, assign them responsibility for the events they cannot explain, seek their favor through prayer and sacrifice, and read chance occurrences as messages revealing their intentions. These psychological mechanisms, then as now, comprise the machinery that consistently and dependably churns out gods.
At the root of religion lies the existence of things unseen. If this were not so, faith and revelation would be superfluous. Gods, angels, demons, miracles, the afterlife—every major aspect of religion escapes direct observation, existing only as objects of the imagination.
The sources of these imagined objects are many. Dreams, hallucinations, and illusions—coupled with the mind’s relentless search for patterns—all collude to conjure apparitions that seem capable of influencing the future and easing our deepest anxieties. They then become the bedrock for the establishment of our religious traditions, particularly in the context of events we can’t otherwise explain.
Once invisible agents are admitted into our worldview, they become ready-made explanations for every mystery. For the ancients, lightning became Zeus’s thunderbolts, mental illness the work of demons, and famine the vengeance of angry gods—until advances in electricity, medicine, and agronomy rendered those explanations obsolete.
Religion, in other words, was humanity’s first attempt at clarifying and controlling nature. It did so by personifying it. “And for that part of religion which consisteth in opinions concerning the nature of powers invisible,” Hobbes wrote, “there is almost nothing that has a name that has not been esteemed amongst the Gentiles, in one place or another, a god or devil.”
Humanity has worshiped nearly everything imaginable: the sun and stars, rivers and mountains, bulls and crocodiles, kings and heroes, even abstract concepts such as Love, Fate, and Luck. There seems to be almost nothing that has not, at one time or another, been used as an instrument for wishful thinking.
Yet it’s all an illusion—born out of feelings of helplessness in the face of forces beyond our control. As Hobbes so memorably put it:
For as Prometheus…was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where an eagle, feeding on his liver, devoured in the day as much as was repaired in the night, so that man, which looks too far before him in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.
Faced with the uniquely human awareness of mortality and uncertainty, our ancestors imagined invisible agents capable of pleading humanity’s case before the court of Fate. But since these agents cannot be queried directly, elaborate methods of appeasement (prayer and sacrifice), divination (astrology, oracles, palmistry), and prophecy (scripture, revelation) took root, “which by reason of the different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men,” Hobbes wrote, “hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another.” In this way, the religions of the past morph into the superstitions and mythologies of the future, and the religions of the world appear ridiculous to all but those who practice them.
“Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, religion; not allowed, superstition,” Hobbes proclaimed, calling into question whether Hobbes considered the gulf between religion and superstition to be all that wide. In fact, he probably didn’t. All such “powers invisible”—not consisting of material bodies extended in space—would have been anathema to Hobbes’s materialist philosophy. As Hobbes wrote elsewhere in Leviathan:
The world (I mean not the Earth only, that denominates the lovers of it worldly men, but the universe, that is, the whole mass of all things that are) is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth; also, every part of body is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the universe is body; and that which is not body is no part of the universe. And because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.
God, for Hobbes, is either a body in space or nothing at all. But if God is a body within space, he cannot also have created the universe in which he himself exists. Whether or not Hobbes was an atheist, then, this conclusion left little room for the central claims of orthodox Christianity. Christian theology posits a personal God who, though described in anthropomorphic terms, somehow exists outside space and time while simultaneously creating both. Hobbes’s materialism could not accommodate such a being. In fact, one cannot help but imagine Hobbes privately ridiculing such a nonsensical conception of God (he seemed to have believed in some impersonal force or incomprehensible first mover).
We can imagine something further: had Hobbes lived in a more tolerant age, he may well have dispensed with the Christian exception altogether and declared all gods (or personal gods, at least) to be nothing more than products of the imagination—phantoms conjured by ignorance and fear. Such a claim was impossible in his own time, of course—at least if one valued one’s life and liberty. Yet the question he left behind still confronts us—a question we are fortunate enough to answer freely: Can belief in God be explained entirely as a product of human psychology?
References and Further Reading
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. 2nd ed. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Stauffer, Devin. Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light: A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Additional articles in the psychology of religion: