Religion begins with a remarkably ordinary human act: trust. Before there can be faith in God, scripture, or revelation, there must first be trust in somebody who tells us these things are true. We do not normally encounter God and subsequently discover religion. We encounter parents, prophets, priests, teachers, scriptures, and traditions that make claims about God. The philosophical problem begins when trust in another human being extends beyond what can be independently verified. At that point trust becomes belief, belief becomes faith, and faith eventually creates an authority over the very person who originally supplied the trust.
This progression is not inherently sinister. Trust is the foundation of all knowledge. We rely on parents, teachers, and experts for most of what we claim to know. The question is not whether we trust, but what happens when the trust we place in religious testimony hardens into an authority that cannot be questioned.
Thomas Hobbes provides a useful starting point. In Leviathan, he connects religious belief with human anxiety about the future and our ignorance of causes. Human beings want explanations for what they cannot understand and reassurance concerning what they cannot control. The unknown creates a peculiar vulnerability. Where knowledge ends, we become receptive to those who claim to know what lies beyond it. Religion occupies precisely this territory: God, divine intention, supernatural reward and punishment, and above all what happens after death.
But Hobbes offers more than this anxiety thesis. In Chapter VII of Leviathan, he lays out a sequence that is rarely followed in full: opinion, then science, then conscience, then faith or belief, and finally deception. This sequence is not arbitrary. It shows precisely how human cognition moves from uncertainty to certainty, and from certainty into illusion. Religious authority is built along this sequence, and to understand how it becomes authority, we must follow Hobbes step by step.
First: the realm of opinion. Hobbes says that where discourse does not begin with proper definitions and proceed by correct reasoning, it ends in opinion — a presumption that something is or is not, without absolute certainty. Opinion itself is not evil. Most human judgment is opinion. The problem is that opinion is mistaken for knowledge. Hobbes warns that men “vehemently in love with their own new opinions” give those opinions the reverenced name of conscience, pretending “to know they are true, when they know at most but that they think so.”
Second: the limits of science. Hobbes’s concept of science is narrower than the modern usage: it is only conditional knowledge of the consequences of words — if this, then that — not absolute knowledge of facts. This means that any claim about God, the soul, or the afterlife cannot be science. It can only remain opinion or faith. Religion has never demonstrated that its claims meet the standard of science, yet it consistently demands the certainty that science alone can provide.
Third: the corruption of conscience. In Hobbes’s original definition, conscience is shared knowledge — two or more men knowing the same fact together are “conscious” of it. But the word was later used metaphorically for a person’s secret inner opinion, and eventually became a licence for anyone to insist on their private belief. This corruption is crucial: when private opinion acquires the name of conscience, it becomes unquestionable, because questioning conscience becomes a moral offence. Religion exploits this semantic shift — the opinions of prophets, believers, and institutions are elevated into an inviolable “conscience,” when they are in fact unverified private presumptions.
Fourth: the misdirection of faith. Here Hobbes makes his sharpest distinction. When a person’s discourse does not begin from definitions but from the saying of another, then “the Discourse is not so much concerning the Thing, as the Person; and the Resolution is called Beleef, and Faith: Faith, in the man; Beleef, both of the man, and of the truth of what he says.” In other words, the primary object of faith is not God, but the person. People trust the prophet first, and only then trust what the prophet says about God. This order cannot be reversed. No one encounters God directly and subsequently discovers religion. People encounter other people who claim to represent God.
Fifth: the structural birth of deception. This is where Hobbesian deception emerges. Deception does not require the prophet to lie consciously. Deception occurs at the moment trust transfers from the person to the claim. When “I trust this man” becomes “I trust what he says” becomes “this is true,” an irreversible cognitive shift has taken place. The listener never has access to the thing the prophet claims — God, heaven, hell, the afterlife. The listener has access only to the prophet. Once the prophet is gone, the claim attaches itself to the text, then to the institution, then to the interpreters, then to the parents. Each transmission makes the human origin less visible and the claim’s authority more absolute. “I trust this person” finally becomes “God has said this.” But these are not philosophically identical statements. Between the human being and the supposed divine command stands an unverifiable claim, sustained only by trust that was always placed in a person — never in the God the person claimed to represent.
The afterlife exposes this problem with unusual clarity. No living person can independently travel beyond death, examine what exists there, and return with evidence available for everyone else to test. Yet religions make remarkably confident claims about what follows death — resurrection, heaven, hell, reincarnation, judgement, liberation — each asserted as certain by those who trust a particular authority. The contradiction is not that one of these claims must be false. It is that every one of them is presented as knowledge when none can be independently verified by the living. The believer does not know what happens after death. The believer trusts someone who claims to know.
This produces the structure at the centre of religion: trust becomes belief, belief becomes faith, faith creates authority, and authority demands obedience. The paradox is extraordinary because the believer participates in creating the authority that later governs the believer. A scripture possesses no sacred authority over someone who does not first believe it sacred. A prophet cannot command the conscience of someone who does not first trust the prophet. Hell cannot frighten someone who has not first accepted another person’s claim that hell exists. Religious authority therefore obtains its initial power from the trust voluntarily supplied by the believer.
Once that authority exists, however, the relationship reverses. The believer originally judged whether to trust the religious claim; religion now claims the authority to judge the believer. It may determine what is true and false, permitted and forbidden, sacred and sinful. It may govern marriage, sexuality, food, clothing, worship, family life, and morality. Most importantly, its commands are no longer presented as ordinary human opinions. They are attributed to a higher authority that cannot be questioned without questioning God itself.
This is what I mean by religious illusion, rather than deception in the ordinary sense, since deception implies conscious intent. A sincere person can transmit an untrue proposition received sincerely from somebody else. Parents believe because their parents believed; teachers inherit interpretations from earlier teachers; institutions preserve doctrines received from previous institutions. A chain of sincere belief can continue for centuries without providing independent verification of the original claim. Sincerity proves sincerity. Antiquity proves age. Consensus proves agreement. None, by itself, proves truth.
The contradiction becomes particularly visible when religions encounter one another. A believer who accepts one revelation can be remarkably sceptical towards another. The Christian may reject another scripture’s divine origin; the Muslim may reject central Christian theological claims; followers of other religions may reject both while accepting their own sacred traditions. Each can recognise the weakness of an unverifiable claim when somebody else’s religion makes it. The difficult question is whether the believer has subjected their own religion to the same standard.
If another religion told you that its prophet received the final truth directly from God, what evidence would you require? If its followers showed you an ancient scripture and said its sacred status proved its divine origin, would you accept it? If millions believed it, would numbers prove it? If generations had died believing it, would sacrifice establish its truth? If these arguments are insufficient when another religion presents them, why should they become sufficient when presented by one’s own?
Religion survives this contradiction partly because faith is commonly inherited before it is examined. Children do not normally conduct comparative theological investigations before acquiring religion. They first trust their parents. Through that natural trust they can inherit propositions about God, scripture, morality, and death long before possessing the intellectual independence required to evaluate them. What begins as inherited trust can later feel like independently discovered truth. Eventually faith becomes identity: not merely “I believe this,” but “this is what I am.”
Once belief becomes collective identity, “I believe” becomes “we believe,” and “we” necessarily creates the possibility of “they.” Believer and unbeliever, orthodox and heretic, saved and damned emerge from boundaries constructed around claims that cannot be independently settled. The disagreement becomes particularly dangerous when each side believes its authority is not human but divine. Human laws can be amended and political disputes negotiated because human authority is recognised as fallible. A command believed to come from an infallible God is different. Compromise can itself become disobedience.
This is where I locate the root of harm in religion. Religion creates an architecture in which independent judgment can be surrendered to an authority, authority becomes sacred, obedience becomes virtue, collective belief becomes identity, and identity divides humanity between those who belong and those who do not. Political ideologies, nationalism, and personality cults can reproduce the same architecture even when they reject God. They become religious in structure when doctrine becomes unquestionable, leaders become effectively infallible, dissent becomes heresy, and individuals surrender judgment to something declared greater than themselves. Removing the word God does not necessarily remove the structure of faith.
Hobbes in Chapter XII states this even more directly: all formed religions are founded upon the faith of men in a single person — one who is not only esteemed wise, but also believed to have been supernaturally instructed by God. When those who govern religion are suspected of insufficient wisdom, sincerity, or love, or when they fail to show any credible evidence of divine revelation, the religion itself must necessarily be suspected. Hobbes’s logic is clear: the foundation of religious authority is always one person’s trust in another, and nothing more.
The solution is therefore not compulsory atheism. Forcing people not to believe would merely reproduce the same surrender to authority. Nor should believers be persecuted or prohibited from worshipping. The abolition of religion must mean something more profound: the abolition of the authority that unverifiable claims exercise over human beings. God may exist. An afterlife may exist. There may be realities beyond present human understanding. But possibility is not knowledge, trust is not proof, and no human being acquires authority over another merely by claiming privileged access to what cannot independently be known.
Human freedom therefore begins with three intellectually difficult words: I do not know. They preserve something that faith surrenders: the freedom to continue questioning. The road towards peace does not require humanity to discover the correct religion. It requires us to recognise how trust becomes belief, how belief becomes faith, and how faith becomes authority. Once an unverifiable authority is placed above human reason and freedom, the person who originally gave the trust can become subject to the authority created from it. To break that cycle is not to abandon the search for truth. It is to refuse to surrender our freedom before we have found it.
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