Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 06 – 30
Bacon’s discussion of the human tendency to impose imagined order upon nature, as presented in Aphorism I:45 of the Novum Organum (1620), has been interpreted by some later commentators as extending to the formation of anthropomorphic conceptions of God. This should not be understood as a theological claim that divinity is a human construct, but rather as an epistemological observation: the human mind naturally projects its own modes of thought, intention, will, and agency onto what transcends immediate experience and comprehension. Such anthropomorphic framing reflects precisely the kind of cognitive tendency Bacon sought to expose—the inclination to impose human patterns of order and meaning upon reality. Although this application is not explicit in the present aphorism, it illustrates the broader scope of Bacon’s critique of the idola mentis (“idols of the mind”).
Some contemporary readers may therefore be tempted to associate Bacon’s analysis with modern naturalistic accounts of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, for example, has argued that concepts of God arise from the human mind’s evolved tendency to detect agency, intention, and purpose even where none exists. Such explanations treat religious belief as a psychological and cultural phenomenon requiring no independent theological foundation. Bacon advanced no such thesis. His concern was not to explain the origin of religion or to deny the reality of God, but to identify recurrent tendencies by which the human intellect projects its own characteristics onto the objects of thought.
The distinction is therefore methodological rather than theological. Bacon examined how the human mind forms conceptions of God, not whether God exists. His analysis belongs to epistemology—the study of the conditions and limitations of human knowledge—whereas modern naturalistic accounts often proceed from an explanation of religious cognition to conclusions about the ontological status of religion itself. Confusing these two levels risks attributing to Bacon conclusions that belong to a much later intellectual tradition. The modern comparison is therefore valuable chiefly as a contrast: it clarifies both the breadth of Bacon’s analysis of cognitive bias and the limits of what his epistemology was intended to establish.
Bacon, F. (1620) Novum Organum, Aphorism I-XLV (1:45)
The human intellect, by its very nature, readily presumes a greater degree of order and uniformity in things than it actually discovers. Even though many entities in nature are singular and marked by inequality, they nonetheless constructs imagined parallels, analogies, and relations where none exist. Hence the fictions that, in the heavens, all things move in perfect circles, while spiral paths and “dragons” are altogether dismissed, except in name. Hence, too, the element of fire, together with its celestial sphere, was introduced to complete a quartet with the three others perceptible to the senses. Moreover, a tenfold ratio in rarity is arbitrarily imposed among the so-called elements. And such dreams not only infect dogmatic systems, but also corrupt the very simplest notions.
Hossein Jorjani 