Transcript of a public lecture delivered in St. Petersburg, 25 May.
Video lecture: YouTube
The goal of my lecture is to move through the main stages of the history of atheism from antiquity to the twenty-first century.
A word on terminology first. What I do is secular, non-confessional religious studies. We present facts; we do not evaluate them from the position of personal belief or unbelief. A religious scholar can be a believer or not — what matters is that belief is left at the laboratory door.
The Problem with the Term
The most common understanding of atheism: “I don’t believe in god.” But questions arise immediately.
What if a person lives in a culture with no concept of a single god? Ancient China, for instance, had no such concept. Is that person an atheist? Terminologically: open question.
What if someone doesn’t believe in gods, but does believe in UFOs, the evil eye, astrology, and demons? Are they an atheist?
This runs into another problem: “supernatural” is a category of our own era. For people of antiquity, for many traditional cultures, there was no break between “natural” and “supernatural.” A dead ancestor did not go somewhere “beyond the veil” — they simply occupied another room of reality.
There is also a useful distinction in English: lack of belief versus rejection of God. These are fundamentally different positions. The first is sometimes called atheism, the second antitheism. Terminological precision in this area is scarce.
And the largest problem: religious scholars have never agreed on what religion is. The textbook definition (“a worldview based on belief in the supernatural”) is inadequate for serious discussion. Atheism is therefore historically specific: when talking about atheism, one should always specify which kind.
Antiquity: The Impious and the Godless
Ancient atheism is quite different from its modern counterpart. Finding an ancient thinker who directly said “I deny the gods” is nearly impossible. Atheism took other forms, and two distinct terms were used.
The impious (asebeis) — people who might acknowledge the gods’ existence but mocked the cult. Why bring a rooster to Asclepius? Why these mysteries? The impious person is sceptical of ritual practice, but may well believe in the gods themselves.
The godless (atheoi) — those who doubt that the gods are as the majority conceive them. Or those who worship gods, but the wrong ones. This sounds like nonsense from a modern standpoint, but in antiquity it was perfectly logical. In the early centuries of Christianity, a sincere believer could be called godless simply for believing incorrectly.
Godlessness was a state crime and frequently served as a tool of political settling of accounts.
Anaxagoras was expelled from Athens for the hypothesis that the sun might be simply a hot stone. That was enough.
Socrates is familiar to everyone, though less is known about him than people suppose. In the fifth century BCE the Athenian Assembly passed a decree against those who did not honour the gods or who studied celestial phenomena. Socrates was sentenced to death by poison. As he died, he asked that a rooster be brought to Asclepius — the sign of recovery. Either black humour, or an expression of belief that in shedding the body he was joining something higher. He was, in any case, a believing man. He was prosecuted for criticising the dominant cults, not for unbelief as such.
Protagoras, the founding relativist (“man is the measure of all things”), was expelled. In that stratified society, expulsion was the equivalent of civic death. The Cambridge scholar Tim Whitmarsh has argued in his book that unbelief in the gods was a legitimate practice in antiquity — a contested but interesting claim.
Diagoras came closest of anyone to what we today call atheism, which is why he is treated as the symbol of ancient atheism. He mocked the mysteries mercilessly, received both charges — impiety and godlessness. When his death sentence was read, he addressed the gods: “If you exist — save me.” Then he fled.
Euhemerus gave his name to a whole approach — Euhemerism. He read mythology historically: Zeus is a projection of some great man of antiquity who was deified after his death. A rational, earthly explanation for the origin of belief in gods. In some sense a forerunner of the modern sociology of religion.
Epicurus and His School
Epicurus held a place of honour in the ancient lists of the godless, though he was a believing man. He stated directly: the gods exist. They are simply not as the masses imagine them.
His argument: if gods exist, we are insects to them. Does a person take an interest in the life of a bacterium or an ant? The gods are blessed and eternal — those are their two essential properties. They are not interested in our squabbles and wars. Belief in gods who watch and reward and punish us is belief in absurdity.
In this sense Epicurus was the Carl Sagan of his time: a destroyer of superstitions, a critic of irrational fear.
Calling him godless by modern standards is like calling a teetotaller an alcoholic. His “godlessness” was godlessness in the ancient sense: he believed in different gods than the majority did.
The most famous follower of Epicurus was Titus Lucretius Carus, writing in Rome. He sought a rational explanation for the origin of religion and located it in fear of higher powers. Contemporary cognitive religious studies disagrees: religion is more likely evolutionarily conditioned than born of deception or fear. Believing that a tiger might spring from behind a bush is evolutionarily advantageous. Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained is a good entry point.
Epicurus’s reputation is unfairly poor. “Epicurean” today conjures a portly hedonist basking in bodily pleasures. In fact, for Epicurus himself the highest pleasure was friendly conversation. His tetrapharmakos (four remedies) was a programme for liberation from four main fears, including fear of the gods and fear of death. The earliest Christians denounced Epicurus with particular ferocity — which is itself a kind of tribute.
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Open atheism is absent from the Middle Ages altogether. In the Renaissance — almost entirely. The Inquisition was most active precisely in these periods. Religious freedom was a very distant prospect.
Here the more accurate term is freethought: a critical stance towards religious institutions or specific religious claims, not necessarily implying unbelief.
Duns Scotus allowed that matter might be capable of thought. The suggestion alone was an act of freethinking.
Pierre Abélard — an early medieval freethinker, though with significant qualification.
Averroes transmitted Aristotle to the Arabic world and can be considered a proto-freethinker, not an atheist.
Lorenzo Valla is best known as the founder of critical philology: he demonstrated the forgery of the Donation of Constantine, the document that had legitimised the Church’s precedence over secular authorities. He was a Christian, but shared elements of Epicurean thought — something that became at least conceivable in the Renaissance.
Tommaso Campanella, author of The City of the Sun, spent twenty-seven years in prison for an anti-Spanish conspiracy. His book Atheism Conquered gave Soviet historians the strange opportunity to argue that the author of Atheism Conquered was himself a secret atheist — on the grounds that he presented atheist arguments with too much sympathy before refuting them. He was also an enthusiastic astrologer. Such were the “atheists” of the Renaissance.
On the Soviet historiographical tradition: it worked tirelessly to classify as latent atheists anyone who looked at religion even slightly sideways. The scholar Voronitsyn wrote of Thomas More — the author of Utopia, Archbishop of Canterbury, and a man who went to his death rather than betray the Catholic Church — that “More related to religion in a twofold manner, as a politician, as a representative of the trading English bourgeoisie.” Spinoza received the same treatment, though Spinoza would have been appalled to be called an atheist. He was a pantheist of deep personal spirituality.
On Giordano Bruno: his bust stands in Moscow’s Museum of Cosmonautics beside Kepler and Copernicus, which is a historical absurdity. Bruno was burned for theological heterodoxy and heresy, not for astronomical claims. He was a neo-Pythagorean. The myth that the Church burned scientists for doing science is persistent and false.
The French Enlightenment: The First Open Atheists
The Enlightenment in France finally produces genuine atheists in the modern sense.
Voltaire was not an atheist. “Crush the infamous thing” referred to the Catholic Church as an institution, not to god. “If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” — he affirmed god’s existence. A deist and a freethinker, not an atheist.
Precursors of the French Enlightenment: Rabelais (active mockery of the clergy), Montaigne (Essays — critical reflection on religion; warmly recommended).
La Mettrie was one of the first fully-fledged atheists in the modern sense. He developed a mechanistic, materialist philosophy: if everything is explained through the movement of matter, the hypothesis of god becomes unnecessary. The famous anecdote: Laplace, in conversation with Napoleon, responded to a question about god: “I have no need of that hypothesis.” La Mettrie had arrived at this step long before. His Natural History of the Soul was condemned by parliament as “a work of darkness” — a distinction worth aspiring to.
Paul Henri d’Holbach was the first to attempt a comprehensive, systematic critique of religion. His The Sacred Contagion is scarcely distinguishable in spirit from contemporary anti-religious polemic. He was a baron — which did not prevent the Marxists from celebrating him. He developed the question of morality without god: morality is only possible without god, because morality requires free choice, not obedience under threat of punishment. A forerunner of vulgar materialism.
The French Revolution stood on these men’s shoulders. The Cult of Reason — an attempt to find a substitute for religion. Napoleon concluded a new concordat with the papacy, considering it a necessary political tool. From antiquity to the modern era: to criticise the gods is to criticise the existing order.
The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
In the nineteenth century, being an atheist in public is no longer punishable by burning.
Schopenhauer — an atheist in the moral dimension as well as the metaphysical.
Nietzsche — The Antichrist: not merely a critique of god’s existence, but a critique specifically of the Christian god as a religion of slave mentality. Most of what he wrote is asserted rather than argued, but it is written with genius.
Feuerbach — engaged in polemic with Marx, developed the materialist critique of religion.
1859: Darwin’s Origin of Species. From this point, the main argument for god’s existence — William Paley’s argument from design — ceases to function. The argument: if you find a watch in the desert, you infer a maker; if you find a stone, you do not. Darwin showed how complex structures (the eye, for instance) can arise without an external architect. Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion) is still arguing against this claim — because it is still in circulation.
Marxism incorporates atheism organically: it is impossible to be a Marxist and a theist simultaneously.
In the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley (relative of Aldous Huxley) coined the term “agnosticism.” Atheism and agnosticism finally separate into distinct positions.
The twentieth century: atheism acquires a practical as well as a theoretical dimension. In 1967, Albania was declared the first officially atheist state in the world. Major atheists of the century include Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian), Freud (The Future of an Illusion), Jean-Paul Sartre. The theory of secularisation flourished — the idea that modernisation displaces religion. Ronald Inglehart described a catastrophic decline in religiosity from 2007 in Religion’s Sudden Decline.
The Twenty-First Century: New Atheism
The pivotal event: 11 September 2001. Sam Harris sits down and writes The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Both became bestsellers. The movement of New Atheism takes shape — the Four Horsemen: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell).
The New Atheists are distinguished from their predecessors by a new level of radicalism: they are prepared to call religion straightforwardly harmful and foolish.
Atheists make up approximately thirteen percent of the world’s population according to various surveys — a small figure because it is based on self-identification. If one asks directly “do you believe in god — no,” the number rises substantially. Stigmatisation of the word “atheist” persists, particularly in the United States, which — contrary to common assumptions — is a country of far more pronounced religious fundamentalism than Russia.
More significant than the atheist count is the rise of the nones — people who do not identify with any religion. Their numbers are growing steadily, and this process is reshaping the religious map of the contemporary world.
Recommended reading:
- Pascal Boyer. Religion Explained
- Ronald Inglehart. Religion’s Sudden Decline
- Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion
- Bertrand Russell. Why I Am Not a Christian
- Tim Whitmarsh. Battling the Gods