Talk given at Cokethorpe School, 29 September 2020.
Atheism — the denial of God, or the gods — may feel like a modern phenomenon, a relatively recent addition to our intellectual toolbox. However, atheism actually has a long and interesting history. I hope to outline that history today, and to that end I have chosen five key moments that define and characterise the history of atheism in Europe (I am restricting my comments to the European tradition).
Around 130BC, the Carthaginian philosopher Clitomachus becomes head of the Platonic Academy (the main philosophical school in Athens). At this point, the Academy is teaching scepticism, so our author is known to history as Clitomachus the Sceptic. And around this time he writes and publishes his work On Atheism — a book-length study of atheism and (in)famous atheists. Sadly, the work itself has not survived, but it informed later writers like Cicero, who quotes it extensively and gives us a good idea of what it contained. I have chosen this moment because it is striking that atheism already has a history, a tradition and an identity as early as 130BC.
ἄθεος (a-theos) is a Greek word meaning ‘without God’, and is the regular adjective used by Greek writers to describe heretics and unbelievers [1]. Clitomachus tells us that the most notorious early atheist was Diagoras of Melos who was prosecuted for impiety in Athens in 415BC. Diagoras is said to have chopped up a wooden statue of the god Heracles to roast his turnips. Such an act, of course, is more than atheist: it is deliberately sacrilegious, even (to use a later term) antitheist. This is the first appearance of a brash confidence that will recur throughout the history of atheism: a loud and proud refusal to conform. Another notorious unbeliever was Theodorus of Cyrene. Cyrene was a Greek colony in North Africa (modern Libya) renowned as a centre of pleasure: it was a hot and steamy place. In fact, a short-lived philosophical school known as the Cyrenaics arose here, advocating sensual and carnal pleasure as the path to happiness. The school did not survive for long nor, perhaps, did many of its practitioners. Theodorus, like Diagoras, was prosecuted for impiety in Athens around 310BC; no doubt the pursuit of carnal pleasure is hampered by any belief in a watchful God. A different type of atheism appears in Strato of Lampsacus, the third head of the other major philosophical school in Athens, the Lyceum of Aristotle. Aristotle himself was a scientific thinker and believed that the universe was a (largely) natural phenomenon open to scientific enquiry. Nowadays, we call this attitude ‘naturalism’. Strato was a more thoroughgoing naturalist even than Aristotle, and this led to his denial of anything supernatural, including the gods.
There were many more names in Clitomachus’ history, which suggests that atheism was flourishing in classical Greece. However, we must ask a difficult question: what exactly does it mean for someone to be ‘atheos’ at this time? Unfortunately classical religions are difficult to characterise. On the one hand, they seem quite outward, more concerned with the appearance of worship. Perhaps the Greeks and Romans did not really believe in the dozen gods on Olympus, in the myths and legends, but were content merely to observe the outward forms of religion, celebrating the festivals, visiting the temples, attending the sacrifices. In this case, being ‘atheos’ was not so radical: an atheist merely voiced what others were thinking, was simply honest or perhaps tactless. If, on the other hand, the pagan religions gave rise to a more authentic belief, and if the Greeks and Romans genuinely connected to their gods and goddesses, then being an atheist involved a more radical freedom of thought. Perhaps we should assume a spectrum of belief, from the faithful to the unbelievers. As Edward Gibbon put it (quoting Seneca — the sentiment is a classical one):
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ii
Not long after Clitomachus publishes his history, Christianity emerges and soon becomes dominant in Europe. And being an atheist in a Christian world is very different from being an atheist in a pagan one.
We move forward now to the high Middle Ages. This was a profoundly theological time, where all aspects of life were administered by the church, and there is no doubt that people genuinely believed in the stories and the scriptures. At such a time, when almost everyone is quite literally singing from the same hymn-sheet, it must have been very difficult to conceive of a godless world, to think outside the religious categories — especially when such alternatives were prohibited as heretical. And yet we do get interesting glimpses of unbelief. Perhaps the most startling is to be found in the writings of Peter of Cornwall, the head of the Holy Trinity Priory in Aldgate, London. In 1200 Peter sadly notes the following [2]:
There are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they believe that a human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now, and is ruled by chance rather than by Providence.
Who are these ‘many people’ that Peter mentions? Perhaps, as in the quotation from Gibbon, they are the academics and philosophers. But that seems unlikely: at this time philosophy was practised in the universities under church control, or in the schools of the Dominican and Franciscan orders. Philosophers at this time were (by most standards) rigorously orthodox. So perhaps Peter is talking instead about the working men and women on the streets of London. We cannot know for sure, but it is a tantalising thought.
There is one other glimpse of medieval atheism that I would like to mention. Around a century before Peter, Anselm published his famous ontological argument for the existence of God. Anselm prefaces this argument by quoting the opening of Psalm 14:
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
The fact that Anselm feels compelled to argue for God’s existence, and mentions at the outset these unbelieving ‘fools’, allows us to infer that there were some people declaring their unbelief, to whom Anselm’s argument is in part addressed.
Of course, at such a time radical thinking does not come without a cost. Freethinkers were often the victims of inquisition, prosecution, torture and death. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Middle Ages is the least fertile period for the evidence of atheism.
Jean Meslier was a parish priest in France, who served his parishioners faithfully for 40 years until his death in 1729. Among his papers was discovered an explosive 633-page manuscript denouncing religion and arguing for atheism. Meslier referred to this as his Testament to his parishioners, but its subtitle is more explicit: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World.
Meslier’s book contains no original material; rather, it is a powerful compendium of common philosophical and theological disputes arranged so as to lead to an overwhelming rejection of God and religion. The Testament was published by Voltaire and became something of a cause célèbre, and its scandalous atheism served as an emblem of the radical French enlightenment.
For we are now in the Age of Reason, and it is at this time that we find the first, truly modern atheists. In the 17th century great thinkers like Hobbes in England and Spinoza in Holland create comprehensive systems of thought, frameworks for understanding the world and our place within it, which do not depend upon God or religion — thus laying the groundwork for our modern secular values. It is interesting to note that the first legislation against blasphemy is passed in England at this time, towards the end of the seventeenth century; we can infer that if a law is needed to prohibit something, there must be something to prohibit in the first place.
Then, early in the eighteenth century, Voltaire published Meslier’s Testament — but not without significant edits and even some additional material of his own. For Voltaire was not an atheist himself. Rather, like many thinkers at this period, he was a deist. Deism was a philosophically respectable compromise: deists rejected much orthodox religious doctrine and teaching, but not divinity itself, believing that somewhere in the background was a benevolent divine intelligence that ruled the universe. Atheism was still something of a slur at this time (Spinoza’s opponents reviled him as the ‘atheist Jew’): few people embraced the term, and the majority of those who did were French. Perhaps the most notorious French atheist at this time was Baron Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach. D’Holbach was a wealthy aristocrat who hosted a bi-weekly salon in Paris, to which the greatest intellectuals of the day were invited to discuss these new and controversial ideas. There is a revealing story about d’Holbach and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who himself did so much to undermine religious thinking in the English-speaking world — although he never acknowledged that he was an atheist, probably for good sceptical reasons. Hume was invited to France and to d’Holbach’s salon where the conversation turned to religion. Ever the cautious sceptic, Hume declared to his host that he had never met a real atheist; d’Holbach replied, perhaps missing Hume’s point, that there were seventeen of them sitting around the table. The anecdote captures the difference between the cautious British scepticism and a more radical French unbelief; an unbelief that would inform the French Revolution a few years later, and would ultimately lead to the resolutely secular French state we see today.
It is worth asking why atheism emerges so clearly at this time, and there are many answers to that question; but I would like to highlight two. Firstly, philosophy in the Enlightenment is no longer under the control of the church: thinkers like Hobbes and Spinoza, Hume and the philosophes, are not practising in universities or institutions but are independent, and thus able to explore radical new horizons. Secondly, this is the age of modern science. Newton published his Principia in 1687, and the new scientific theories largely supported the claims of atheists. There is a story about the French physicist, Laplace, who towards the end of the eighteenth century published a mechanistic, secular account of the universe. When Napoleon asked him why he did not mention God in his book, Laplace replied that he ‘had no need of that hypothesis’. The idea that God has become merely an hypothesis, one among many that may even be discarded, neatly captures the spirit of the age.
The cautious scepticism of the eighteenth century gradually gives way to an earnest and confident secularism in the nineteenth century. The Romantic poet Percy Shelley is expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for publishing an essay entitled The Necessity of Atheism, which was too much for the University authorities. In England, radical thinking emerges with the utilitarians and famously John Stuart Mill, who was a noted atheist; in Germany, the atheist Karl Marx develops his revolutionary economic and political theories; in France, Auguste Comte suggests that all societies evolve through three stages — the theological, the metaphysical and the scientific — thus dismissing theology as an early and primitive form of thinking. By the end of the nineteenth century, secularism was flourishing and in 1882 it was possible finally to declare that God is dead.
Most people know of Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead, but not everyone looks at the context of the quotation, or understands what Nietzsche is really saying. He puts it in the form of a parable: a ‘madman’ runs into a town square and is surrounded by villagers who laugh and jeer as he delivers a powerful speech — part of which I quote here:
We have killed him — you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?.. God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! Nietzsche, The Gay Science §125
Nietzsche recognises that after the profound changes of the Enlightenment, we have adopted ways of thinking and living that take no account of God — God, as it were, has dropped out of the picture. We may not even be aware of it, but we have left God behind — and the profound implications of this are what agitates the madman. Nietzsche’s metaphors capture this brilliantly: the image of wiping away the horizon reminds us that without a horizon, we have no way of telling up from down — so without God, we are without any absolute direction. Similarly, the sun holds the earth in place through its gravitational pull, but once freed from the pull of the sun, the earth would hurtle into the void — so without the anchor of God we are free but lost in space. The madman is troubled by the enormous implications of this new world without God: thus Nietzsche anticipates and defines the crisis of modernity.
This crisis, the death of God, is the result of many different forces. Not merely philosophy, although the old arguments about the nature of God and the problem of evil continue to be rehearsed. But now religion comes under moral scrutiny: doctrines like Hell and eternal damnation are considered cruel, and the history of inquisitions, religious wars and censorship undermines the authority of the church. Science continues apace, and the greatest theory of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s account of natural selection, solves the problem of apparent design — the world was not, after all, created to fit us, but we evolved to fit the world. Psychology also comes of age in this century, and offers a new account of religious concepts as pathologies: not visions but schizophrenia; not demonic possession but epilepsy; not sin and evil but sickness. Moreover, the atheist Sigmund Freud develops the notion of religion as projection, as the manifestation of our childish insecurities. And perhaps most damagingly, anthropology documents the many religions around the world and in the distant past (this is also the great century of archaeology) to reveal how cultures invent their forms of worship and their gods: religions — including our own — appear to be cultural artefacts. The arguments continue to pile up.
I have chosen 2004 and the publication of Sam Harris’ book ‘The End of Faith’ not because it is a particularly good book, but because it is the opening broadside in a movement that would be called New Atheism.
New Atheism is a product largely of four men — the ‘four horsemen’ as they have been called. The biologist Richard Dawkins; the American philosopher Daniel Dennett; the polemicist Christopher Hitchens; and Sam Harris himself, an American neuroscientist. Within a few years all four had published books attacking God and religious belief; and with the books came book-tours and public debates, videos of which can be found online. Although called New Atheism, it is in fact old atheism — but with the volume turned up to 11. The New Atheists direct the traditional weapons of science and philosophy against religious and magical thinking, insisting on the importance of evidence and facts. This is the latest appearance of that brash strain of irreverence, of antitheism, that we saw in Diagoras and later in the radical French Enlightenment. There has been a lot of criticism of the New Atheists, much of it claiming that their target is a simplistic and naive form of religion — a literalism that believes in Eden and Noah — and no doubt some of this criticism is deserved.
But New Atheism is an anomaly. Over the last century or so atheism has in fact become a part of bigger, more comprehensive movements — it has become a starting point, rather than an end point. So in France after the Second World War, existentialism explored the ethical implications of atheism (many existentialists were in fact religious, but the more popular form is that of the atheist Sartre and, to some extent, of Camus). Marxism, of course, was also an atheist ideology. Science remains grounded in naturalism, the old denial of supernaturalism. And lately an old word has been given new life: humanism is a movement that starts from atheism and articulates a rational, ethical and socially compassionate way of living in the world.
So it turns out that atheism has a long and — I hope — interesting history. It is important that we consider atheism as a historical phenomenon, even if at times it seems almost invisible to history, because it teaches us that religious belief is not, and has never been, inevitable. Rather, we have a choice — and it is very important to remember that.