THOMAS HOBBES
Of Religion
From Leviathan
Atomist ideas began to revive in the seventeenth century. Sir Isaac Newton included ninety lines of De Rerum Natura in the early drafts of his Principia. Galileo’s 1623 work, Saggiatore, was so infused with the atomic theory that its friends and critics both referred to it as an Epicurean book.
However, at no time was it other than extremely dangerous to profess any public doubt about religious orthodoxy. Galileo was to discover this to his cost. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who had to live in exile and who was suspected of unsoundness by both sides in the English Civil War, took great care to make formal professions of loyalty to the established Church but found ways in his writing to throw doubt on faith. The heresy-hunters were probably shrewd, if literal-minded, to threaten him with a trial by Parliament on charges of atheism in 1666.
In Chapter XII of Leviathan, his massive essay on statecraft, Hobbes ridicules religion by supposedly defending true faith against paganism.
Seeing there are no signs, nor fruit of religion, but in man only; 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 any other living creatures.
And first, it is peculiar to the nature of man, to be inquisitive into the causes of the events they see, some more, some less; but all men so much, as to be curious in the search of the causes of their own good and evil fortune.
Secondly, upon the sight of any thing that hath a beginning to think also it had a cause, which determined the same to begin, then when it did, rather than sooner or later.
Thirdly, whereas there is no other felicity of beasts, but the enjoying of their quotidian food, ease, and lusts; as having little or no foresight of the time to come, for want of observation, and memory of the order, consequence, and dependence of the things they see; man observeth how one event hath been produced by another; and remembereth in them antecedence and consequence; and when he cannot assure himself of the true causes of things (for the causes of good and evil fortune for the most part are invisible), he supposes causes of them, either such as his own fancy sug esteth; or trusteth the authority of other men, such as he thinks to be his friends, and wiser than himself.
The two first, make anxiety. For being assured that there be causes of all things that have arrived hitherto, or shall arrive hereafter; it is impossible for a man, who continually endeavoureth to secure himself against the evil he fears, and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetual solicitude of the time to come; so that every man, especially those that are over provident, are in a state like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, which interpreted, is, the prudent man, 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.