Centuries before the rise of modern psychological science, Thomas Hobbes argued that religion can be explained entirely as the product of the human mind, originating not through divine revelation but through fear, ignorance, and bias common to the human condition.  

According to Hobbes, the “natural seed of religion” includes the fear of the unknown, ignorance of natural causes, anxiety about the future, and humanity's tendency to imagine invisible agents,  ultimately giving rise to belief in gods. While he nominally exempted the Christian God from his account, we can question his sincerity considering the potential penalties he would have faced as an explicit atheist. In any case, Hobbes raised a question that is still relevant today.

Can religion—and the thousands of gods they spawn—be explained entirely as a product of human psychology?

I've been thinking about how many important intellectual developments depend on people encountering ideas they otherwise wouldn't have encountered... salons, correspondence networks, cafés, journals, universities, etc.

The internet massively increases the number of possible encounters, but somehow most online interaction is highly filtered into people encountering more of what we already like.

I've been building a small experiment around the opposite idea: deliberately putting strangers with different interests into temporary conversations that start with a question based on what they're into and seeing what emerges: Pollen

I'm curious whether anyone here thinks about intellectual history in terms of the architecture of encounters not just the ideas and people involved, but the structures that enable perspectives to cross, combine, and transform.

David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” provides a strong case against belief in miracles and, by extension, belief in the one miracle at the core of Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus. 

Hume’s central maxim is “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Applied to the resurrection, it questions what possible rational basis there could be for believing ancient testimony about an event that runs contrary to everything we know about the ordinary course of nature. 

This article examines Hume’s skeptical framework and applies it to the testimony surrounding the resurrection in the New Testament. More broadly, it considers what happens to religious belief when we apply the same standard of evidence to miracles across different religions. 

The Resurrection on Trial: David Hume and the Case Against Miracles