Thomas Hobbes As An Atheist

There is a debate among scholars of Hobbes whether Hobbes was an atheist, or even whether his philosophy was atheist. There are fewer critics today of Hobbes that make the claim he is an atheist and that his philosophy is itself atheist. It should not be understood to be so. We have to remember that though his views opposed most of the standard views of his time, Hobbes affirmed his faith in Christianity. Also, the term “atheist” had a different connotation prior to modernity. This is to say that Hobbes’s beliefs contrasted with the norm at the time. The question also to be posed is to whether a philosophy or thought can be extricated from the thinker’s bias. Even if Hobbes himself was a devout orthodox Christian, there is an understanding …show more content…
The norm was a philosophy of theism. Across disciplines, theoreticians would underwrite their ideas with references to Christian teachings. This is observable from Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes, to Liebnez’s Discourse on Metaphysics that explains the perfect nature of God and the consequences this entails. Some arguments run back and forth about the nature of Thomas Hobbes’s personal beliefs, about whether he was a disguised atheist. Different writers will point to different texts and come to conclusions about the nature of Mr. Hobbes’s beliefs. Hobbes should be taken at his word, based on his writing from Elements of Law: When it happeneth that a man signifieth unto us two contradictory opinions whereof the one is clearly and directly signified, and the other either drawn from that by consequence, or not known to be contradictory to it; then (when he is not present to explicate himself better) we are to take the former of his opinions; for that is clearly signified to be his, and directly, whereas the other might proceed from error in the deduction, or ignorance of the repugnancy. (69) Hobbes never wavered in public about what his personal beliefs were. It is from this premise that all public statements that Thomas Hobbes professed about his Christian theology must be accepted at face …show more content…
The theory of governance then presupposes the unity is based on command given by God. The question then becomes: if a political sphere that came together under contract, what are the ramifications for the encountering of two spheres that have different basis for a contract. Would the sphere of the Hobbesian contract consider this outside group as just another "man" in the state of nature, or this other entity just part of the state of nature itself? This then raises the question whether this “other” becomes