Is Thomas Hobbes an Atheist?

Many of Hobbes's contemporary critics accused him of atheism. What elements of the argument in Leviathan do you think were responsible for these charges? Do you think that atheism is a correct assessment of Hobbes's position? Why or why not?

Thomas Hobbes was a widely read and controversial author as well as a thinker with wide-ranging interests. During his time, he has been into the world of philosophy, physics, history, and even mathematics that is why he was considered as one of the prominent participants in the intellectual life of his time. However, many people have called Hobbes an atheist, both during his lifetime and more recently. I think this is merely because of Hobbes' belief in materialism as expressed in his works like Leviathan and Elements of Law.

Hobbes was a materialist, someone who believes that everything in the universe consists only of matter in motion. In this Hobbes disagreed with Descartes, who argued that the universe consists of two basic kinds of stuff in causal interaction -- mind and matter. On Descartes's view, mental states (beliefs, desires) can cause events in nature (e.g. hitting a ball), and natural events can cause mental events (as when you get wounded). Hobbes would not believe in any of these. He declared that nonphysical (immaterial, mental) substance is a contradiction-in-terms. We might say that Hobbes's story about the workings of mind and language in early chapters of Leviathan is supposed to be an implicit argument for materialism. We might take Hobbes to be saying, 'I can explain all the workings of the mind using only material resources. What need is there to postulate an immaterial mind when this perfectly good, and more minimal, explanation is available?' (Hobbes 1655, 2.9). He was therefore forced to say that even God is a material substance -- although a very pure and subtle one. This, of course, enraged the churchmen and convinced them of Hobbes's atheism.

There is a study of Hobbes's critics that often mention about Hobbes' atheism and summarizes the reasons those critics gave for calling Hobbes an atheist:

"That the universe is body, that God is part of the world and therefore body, that the Pentateuch and many other books of Scripture are redactions or compilations from earlier sources, that the members of the Trinity are Moses, Jesus, and the Apostles, that few if any miracles can be credited after the Testamental period, that no persons deserve the name of 'martyr' expect those who witnessed the ascension of Christ, that witchcraft is a myth and heaven a delusion, that religion is in fact so muddled with superstition as to be in many vital places indistinguishable from it, [and] that the Church, both in its government and its doctrine, must submit to the dictates of Leviathan, the supreme civil authority (Mintz 1962, 45)."

However, this reasons were