Is the God of your religion truly real, or instead a predictable product of Francis Bacon’s Idols of the Mind—born not from evidence, but from the hidden frailties of human cognition itself?
Francis Bacon identified the cognitive biases at the core of religious belief more than 400 years ago, and they still provide a perfect model for understanding the psychology of religion.
Giordano Bruno thought the universe was infinite and teeming with life—more than 400 years ago and decades before Galileo’s own defense of heliocentrism.
Bruno was among the first to challenge the authority of scripture in science and to spark the imagination of future scientists. For this great service, he was burned at the stake.
Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was a devout Catholic, and sought to prove the existence of God using a variation of the ontological argument. But what he actually accomplished—as the article below asserts—was to unwittingly introduce a method of doubt that forever compromises the authority of religious revelation and faith.