History of Atheism

Atheism has existed in various forms for well over two thousand years, but became a culturally powerful movement only in the past two centuries. Several ancient philosophers, such as Democritus and Epicurus, disputed the existence of the popular Greek and Roman gods or at least questioned their involvement in human affairs. Sextus Empiricus advocated an extreme form of skepticism that was also atheistic. The Enlightenment, an intellectual and cultural movement emerging toward the end of the eighteenth century, rejected the Bible and any other revelation and insisted on unguided human reason as the sole authority in all matters of knowledge. Enlightenment thinkers tended at first to hold to Deism, the belief that a Creator God made the universe but has no further involvement in it, but its method led quickly to atheism.
 

The philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant criticized the standard arguments for God’s existence. If we cannot know God’s existence through either revelation or reason, the only basis left is religious or spiritual feeling or blind faith. Western thought since the Enlightenment has therefore tended in three directions. Some accept the Enlightenment critiques and reject belief in God (atheism). Some accept those critiques and base belief in God on feeling (pietism) or faith (fideism). Some reject those critiques and base belief in God on revelation or reason or both.

Atheism flowered in nineteenth-century German philosophy through such thinkers as Ludwig Feuerbach, who introduced the notion that God was an imagined father figure, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared famously that God was dead meaning that humanity had supposedly understood that God did not exist after all. A key to the development of a thoroughly atheistic worldview, however, was the scientific theory of biological evolution by natural selection in the British scientist Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species (1859). Although not all evolutionists are atheists, atheism is intellectually untenable without some version of evolutionism. Since Darwin, theorists in the behavioral and social sciences have sought to apply the naturalistic assumptions of evolutionism to humanity. A notable example is the work of Sigmund Freud, who developed a theory of human psychology that was overtly atheistic. According to Freud, belief in God is a projection of the ideal father figure and thus a form of wish-fulfillment (compare Feuerbach). Most recently, some scientists have attempted to explain the mind, moral values, and even religious belief in purely biological terms.

Atheism became the worldview basis for powerful totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century through the philosophy of the nineteenth-century atheist Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto (1848) inspired both the Bolshevik (Leninist) Revolution in Russia, leading to the formation of the Soviet Union, and the Communist (Maoist) Revolution in China. The major philosophical tradition of the twentieth century compatible with atheism in the English-speaking world was analytic philosophy. The leading figure of this movement was Bertrand Russell, whose book Why I Am Not a Christian (1927) continues to influence atheist thought today. What is distinctive about atheistic analytic philosophy is its claim that the very concept of God is meaningless. Kai Nielsen and Michael Martin are two contemporary atheist philosophers working from within the analytic tradition. Toward the end of the twentieth century, a group of Christian philosophers—most notably Alvin Plantinga—using the tools and methods of analytic philosophy led a kind of revival of theism (belief in God) as a serious philosophical option.

Contemporary atheism, if anything, tends to be even more aggressive in its denunciation of all religion. The rise of extremist and militant forms of Islam around the world worries atheists, as does the conservative Christian resurgence in politics and culture in the United States. Antagonism toward religion in the West reached a sort of critical mass in September 2006, when two bestselling books attacking belief in God and all religion were published in a two-day period—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Quantifying the number of atheists is notoriously difficult, since many people are reluctant to label themselves as atheists and definitions of atheism vary. According to a 2002 Pew Research study, 1% of Americans professed to be atheists and 2% professed to be agnostics.(1) Yet according to a 2006 Harris poll, 4% of Americans professed to be atheists and 14% professed to be agnostics.(2) Since it is doubtful that so many people changed views in four years, we should be cautious about viewing either of these statistics as definitive. One thing is clear from every study done: atheism is much more prevalent in most of the rest of the industrialized world. The same Harris poll found that 17% of Great Britain, 20% of Germany, and 30% or more of both France and Spain professed to be atheists, while roughly a third of the people in those nations identified themselves as agnostics. Since some forms of Buddhism and Confucianism are atheistic, millions of people associated with these religions in Southeast Asia and China are actually atheists. Worldwide, younger people are more likely to be atheists, suggesting that atheism is likely to be on the rise during the coming years.