Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes's method and aims in civil philosophy in general, and in Leviathan in particular, lead him to leave the "seeds of religion" out of the War Argument because to include those seeds of religion would be counter-productive to his method and aims.

Hobbes's method is based on science, logic, reason, materialism, and empirical observation, none of which is useful in analyzing God or religion. For Hobbes to include the intangibles and mysteries of religion and God in his rational analysis of human nature and politics would have been to poison the entire project with uncertainty.

Hobbes's aim is to construct a philosophy, built on what he hopes are the air-tight bricks of reason and mathematical logic, which convinces human beings that they should immediately form a state in which they give their rights and their lives over to an all-powerful Leviathan forevermore in order that they may be protected from the return of the state of nature and the constant war of that state. For Hobbes to throw religion and God into the very beginning of the project would have led to the very problems he was trying to avoid by conjuring the project in the first place. After all, Hobbes in writing Leviathan was trying to show how peace could be won only when all citizens in a society had given up their rights to the Sovereign, who was himself a god of sorts, certainly a more tangible deity than the God of religions. By introducing God or religion into the recipe, Hobbes would have ef

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obbes's entire political philosophy. Kavka declares outright that "God plays no substantive role in Hobbes's moral and political philosophy. In particular, God plays no role in the derivation of the actual contents of the laws of nature" (Kavka 362). While this appears to be true, and appears to be deliberate on the part of Hobbes, as Kavka writes, the fact remains that Hobbes does have much to say about God and religion in the state of nature Leviathan. The closer one looks at what he says, however, the increasingly insubstantial it becomes: . . . men that . . . arrive to the acknowledgement of one Infinite, Omnipotent, and Eternall God, choose . . . to confesse he is Incomprehensible, and above their understanding . . . and then confesse their definition to be unintelligible (Hobbes 171). Indeed, Kavka writes that Hobbes's failure to assign a definite role to God in forming the laws of nature (laws which step-by-step lead out of war and toward the Leviathan) is not "accidental." Instead, it is a necessary consequence of certain doctrines of Hobbes's "philosophical theology": that we lack knowledge of God [and] . . . can have no idea of him in our minds since he is infinite (Kavka 362). Clearly, the laws of natu

Category: Philosophy - T