Review: Hobbes's Philosophy of Religion, by Thomas Holden

Arash Abizadeh. Review of Thomas Holden, Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2023). In Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2025).

2025/11/07

Commentators have traditionally assumed that the key interpretive question concerning Hobbes’s theology is whether he was a theist (as he proclaimed) or an atheist (as many seventeenth-century critics charged). Holden’s excellent book rejects this assumption, criticizing both traditional theistic and atheistic interpreters, arguing that the central issue in Hobbes’s philosophy of religion concerns not belief but meaning: on Holden’s account, Hobbes pioneered—well before Berkeley—an expressivist treatment of religious language. The key to Hobbes’s extensive treatment of religion is his distinction between the descriptive use of language, which expresses beliefs or propositions and is governed by norms of truth, versus its honorific use, which expresses non-descriptive attitudes, such as a desire to honour, and is governed by the corresponding norms of assertion. Where many commentators read into Hobbes’s theology propositions about God’s nature—either sincerely believed or delivered with a wink—Holden sees instead an attempt to honour a being whose nature is inconceivable.

Holden makes three main claims. First, for Hobbes, all meaningful types of utterance about God, bar one, are honorific expressions, rather than descriptive propositional truth claims. The sole exception is the truth-apt proposition ‘God exists’. Second, this exceptional proposition, in which ‘God’ signifies an inconceivable great cause behind the comprehensible world, is indeed true and can be known to be true: assenting to it is rationally dictated. Third, natural reason dictates (not just belief in God’s existence, but also) expressing reverence for God via natural signs of honour, as well as the conventional forms prevalent in one’s society. Thus, Holden claims that Hobbes was an expressivist about theological language (with one exception), a theist claiming rational warrant, and genuinely reverent and pious. I examine each of these claims in turn.

Few commentators have fully appreciated Hobbes’s “embargo” (as Holden calls it) on descriptivist interpretations of theological language. Even those who acknowledge it in principle often slip into treating particular divine attributes (such as being corporeal or eternal) literally, as if Hobbes were using these concepts to express propositions about God’s nature. But Hobbes was rather explicit—indeed, adamant—about his expressivist theory of religious language, and once Holden has finished methodically laying out the evidence, the expressivist interpretation seems irresistible. At the very least, no one diverging from it can afford to leave Holden’s argument unanswered. I would go further: Holden helps definitively to lay to rest a significant corpus of existing scholarship on Hobbes’s theology. May it rest in peace.

Less definitive is Holden’s second main claim that, for Hobbes, reason justifies belief in and, indeed, furnishes “knowledge” of God’s existence (190). Holden deftly handles an immediate objection to construing Hobbes as a theist, namely, the charge that if we cannot have any conception of God’s nature, then we have no mental representation answering to ‘God’, such that (on Hobbes’s philosophy of language) there can be no meaningful talk of God at all—rendering the proposition ‘God exists’ meaningless rather than true. To this charge of “semantic atheism”, Holden replies that Hobbes can and does fix the meaning of ‘God’, by a relational rather than intrinsic characterization: ‘God’ simply means the inconceivable great cause of the comprehensible universe—whatever it is.

The real challenge lies elsewhere, in the Hobbesian texts touching on whether belief in God’s existence is justified. These can be classified into three categories. First, there are passages rehearsing the cosmological argument, which seem to suggest that one discovers God’s existence by inquiring into the chain of natural causes and, unable to find an end to the regress of antecedent causes, concludes that there must exist a “first cause” at the chain’s beginning. Yet, as Holden, following others, notes, these passages are readily interpreted not as justifying belief in a first cause but as a psychological description of the thought process by which inquirers might, as a matter of fact, come to suppose or think it exists. The normative reading can be rejected.

Second, there are passages in which Hobbes positively argued that (a) the hypothesis of an eternal, unending regress of causes cannot be rationally ruled out (which refutes the cosmological argument), (b) philosophical attempts to prove or demonstrate the existence of a first cause are hopeless, and, in any case, (c) such attempts usurp legal authorities’ right to settle such questions as a matter of faith. (For Hobbes, to have faith in a proposition is to assent to it on the basis of trusting the proposition’s proponents, rather than on the basis of evidence one understands.)

In the face of this second category of text, Holden relies on two moves to shore up his theistic interpretation. First, he treats the notion of first cause not as what defines or fixes the meaning of ‘God’ but rather as one amongst the list of honorific attributes (alongside creator, author, eternal, independent, etc.) by which one may express reverence for God. As noted, Holden takes ‘God’ to mean the incomprehensible great cause that we “posit” (without knowing whether it is a first cause). Thus, the fact that by reasoning we cannot prove or demonstrate the existence of a “first” cause does not preclude proving or demonstrating, and hence obtaining knowledge of, the existence of God, the “great” cause.

Second, he turns to the third category of text, in which Hobbes suggested that the truth of God’s existence could be known (or is dictated) by natural reason. One such passage is the note to De Cive 14.19, where Hobbes, referring to 15.14, said that “I had elsewhere said that it might be knowne (sciri) there is a God, by natural reason”. Appealing to these passages, however, harbours two potential weaknesses.

First, they are not dispositive for Holden’s reading. Although Holden usually keeps Hobbes’s theological expressivism squarely in view, here he seems to flinch. What Holden overlooks is that, according to Hobbes, although sentences attributing existence (unlike other attributes) to God can be meaningfully uttered as a proposition, they can also be uttered honorifically. Indeed, the paragraph to which all of the third-category texts Holden cites ultimately refer, namely, De Cive 15.14, suggests precisely this reading. The section, titled “What the naturall Lawes are concerning Gods attributes,” centres on “what manner of Worship of God naturall reason doth assigne us”. To furnish his answer, Hobbes invited his readers “to begin from [God’s] Attributes: where, first it is manifest, that existence is to be allowed him; for there can be no will to honour him, who, we think [putamus], hath no being”.

This strongly suggests that to say that reason (or natural law) dictates attributing existence to God is merely to say either (a) that doing so is itself a proper way to honour God, i.e., that the dictate concerns not what to believe but how to honour, or (b) that in honouring God, one necessarily presupposes (or must provisionally grant) his existence—or, as Hobbes put it elsewhere, one must “suppose” it. This would mean that when Hobbes concluded in this paragraph that “Reason dictates one name alone, which doth signify the nature of God (i.e.) Existent, or simply, that he is”, he meant either that reason dictates attributing existence as a way to honour God or that it dictates to anyone who would honour him that they suppose his existence. That Hobbes singled out existence as the only “name” that signifies God’s nature (unlike other attributes, which do not, and are merely means for honouring God) strongly favours the latter alternative: although attributing existence can be a way to honour God, what reason specifically dictates, to those who would worship him, is to “suppose” the truth of the proposition that God exists. As Holden himself puts it, God is an inconceivable being we “posit” or “suppose” as the cause of the conceivable universe (55).

Yet for Hobbes it is one thing to suppose or provisionally grant something, quite another to know it. He explicitly distinguished these intentional modes. He defined ‘supposing’ as treating a proposition for which one lacks evidence as if it were true, provisionally “admitting” or “granting” (concedere) it “for a tyme”—for example, to reason with it by inferring its consequences. ‘Knowing’, in the proper, scientific sense, he defined as assenting to a true proposition on the basis of “evidence”, that is, fully understanding its meaning and epistemic warrant. And he defined ‘thinking’ or ‘opining’ something as assenting to a proposition without proper evidence—for example, on the basis of erroneous reasoning or because we find that supposing its truth does not yield absurd consequences, and hence, we take it to be “probable” (Elements of Law 6.1-5, De Cive 18.4). [1]

Supposing a proposition’s truth thus implies neither thinking it is true nor knowing it: even agnostics and atheists can suppose God’s existence for the sake of argument—and, crucially, for the sake of external worship. It is true that De Cive 15.14 refers to thinking (putamus) that God exists, and this puts pressure on my reading here, but recall that Hobbes also characterized supposing a proposition as tantamount to provisionally admitting or conceding its truth. And in any case, neither supposing nor thinking amounts to knowing, i.e., to assenting to a proposition the truth of which reason dictates must be acknowledged.

It is also true that many of the derivative third-category passages, which refer to De Cive 15.14, use a term for knowing (scire). So, Holden’s interpretation has these formulations in its favour. But this favour is diminished by the fact that in theological contexts, Hobbes was prepared to use the term ‘knowledge’ loosely, departing from his official, scientific sense—claiming, for example, that “the knowledge we have…is only Faith…not Evidence, but faith” (Elements of Law11.8-9). It is further diminished by Hobbes’s explicit denials that we could have “evidence” for, and hence know, in the proper scientific sense, the truth of propositions concerning inconceivables.

The second weakness in Holden’s appeal to these third-category passages is that, if read as he does, they contradict the second-category texts, which, as we have seen, expressly deny the possibility of proving, demonstrating, or (properly) knowing that God exists. This runs counter to Holden’s aspiration to reconcile the category two and three texts (51). My own view is that the only way to reconcile them is to recognize that Hobbes thought that reasoning about the existence of God, understood naturalistically as the ultimate cause, justifies neither theism nor atheism but agnosticism. I am especially impressed by second-category passages in Anti-White, as well as De Cive, not emphasized by Holden, that imply that any attempt to reason about God’s existence will undermine faith because reasoning about inconceivables yields not evidence (and hence knowledge) but rather vacillation between affirmation and denial (and hence doubt). [2]

Holden’s third main claim that, for Hobbes, natural reason dictates honouring God, rests on solid textual grounds (even though whether this implies that reason also dictates believing that God exists, i.e., theism, or merely dictates supposing that he does, remains an open question). Importantly, Holden argues that natural reason dictates not just worshiping God via natural signs of honour but also via public, conventional signs that are accepted by and intelligible to others in our society, i.e., by drawing on local convention. What is especially illuminating here is the conclusion Holden draws, namely, that although Hobbes did not believe Christianity’s claims to supernatural revelation, he was nevertheless sincere in his declarations of Christian profession and piety, since these are genuine expressions of honour, not belief. I think Holden’s failure to link his third main claim to Hobbes’s theory of representation and personhood from Leviathan onwards—which Hobbes applied to God with potentially significant implications for the non-natural, conventional aspects of religion[3]—is a surprising lacuna. But his argument for the claim itself—like the first expressivist one in which it is grounded—is compelling.

Overall, Holden’s book is superbly written, enjoyable, wonderfully structured, scholarly, judicious, rigorously argued, and scrupulous in presenting readers with the countervailing evidence. No one studying Hobbes’s philosophy of religion can afford to ignore it.

REFERENCES

Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Agnostic Theology before Leviathan”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2017): 1-24.

Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by Fiction”, The Historical Journal (2017): 1-27.

Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Harley Manuscript 4235 (British Library, London, 1640).

Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

[1] For extensive discussion, see Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Agnostic Theology before Leviathan”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2017): 1-24.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by Fiction”, The Historical Journal (2017): 1-27.