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Atheism in Historical Perspective 1 ATHEISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Atheism is a term of contested meanings. As the Greek alpha privative suggests, ‘a-theism’ is essentially the negation of a position. It is not surprising, therefore, that it signifies the rejection of quite different views across space and time. A passing acquaintance with the competing philosophies of the ancient world reveals that atheism is not a new phenomenon that has emerged with the rise of modern science or the Euro- pean Enlightenment. In the ancient world thinkers as divergent as Socrates and Justin Martyr were charged with atheism, yet both were far from being atheists in the contemporary sense of that term. In the case of the former, Socrates sought the purification of pop- ular Greek religion with its multiplicity of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses. The divine was something higher, more transcendent and ineffable, to be approached by philosophy and virtuous living. For denying their gods and corrupting the youth of the city, the Athenian authorities made him drink the hemlock. Justin, a second-century apologist of the church, notes that Christians too are charged with atheism—they do not honour pagan deities, celebrate their feasts, or offer sacri- fices. For this, they are regarded as dangerous and subversive. Like Socrates and Jesus before him, Justin is martyred for his faith. 16 Atheism in Historical Perspective This is one trend that we find in the ancient world. It is highly critical of the plurality of human-like gods that inhabit the popular imagination. These are denied in the interests of a more refined and purer concept of the eternal or the divine that informs the physical and moral universe. In his study of atheism in pagan antiquity, A. B. Drachman notes that it was restricted to elite groups of wealthy and educated philoso- phers. Within the ancient world, it had little purchase on soci- eties at large.1 This train of philosophical thought is already under way in some of the pre-Socratics such as Xenophanes. It is atheism only in the sense of denying one set of gods in order to affirm a purer form of monotheism or a monism that is distinctly religious in character. Elsewhere in the ancient world, however, we have alterna- tive systems of thought that more closely resemble patterns of atheism and scepticism in the modern world.2 These include the naturalism of Democritus, who saw the universe as com- prising only a set of atoms colliding at random, and also the thought of Protagoras, who seems to suggest a natural expla- nation for religion, morality, and society. In relation to the question of God, agnosticism seems to be his resting place. With regard to the gods I cannot feel sure either that they are, or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure, for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.3 That this is so vigorously contested by Plato suggests that it was a live option at the time. There are also those like Epicurus who while not denying the existence of the gods cannot find them to have any interest in or relevance to human affairs. This position, moreover, is not far from that of the sceptics such as Pyrrho. He cannot pronounce on such lofty matters as the gods and in forsaking such questions seeks a peace and contentment that unfulfilled speculative questing cannot attain. By virtue of his great philosophical poem De Rerum Atheism in Historical Perspective 17 Natura, Lucretius (c. 99–55 BCE) is perhaps the most complete atheist of classical times. He argues that the gods do not exist, that life ends at death, and that religion ought to be abolished because of its many misdeeds. Each of these ancient positions adumbrates philosophies of the modern period. One conclusion that can immediately be drawn from this is that atheism does not rest upon or derive from modern experimental science. Although some forms of atheism have appealed to the methods and conclusions of mod- ern science, a study of ancient philosophy should alert us to the ways in which the various options were established long before modernity. In the west, atheism has come to be associated with the rejection of the God of the Christian faith, or the God of Judaeo-Christian theism, or perhaps still more broadly the God of the three Abrahamic faiths. Again it is essentially reac- tive, taking as its starting point the basic beliefs of a religion or society and offering a revisionist or sceptical judgement upon these. Although there are acknowledged affinities with earlier pagan philosophies, this modern atheism has its own distinct cultural context, particularly with respect to Christianity. The causes of atheism in the modern world are generally located in the culture of the Renaissance and Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The list of causal factors is quite long. It includes the development of free rational enquiry independent of ecclesiastical control, the rise and progress of natural science based upon theory and experiment rather than canonical texts, the religious fracturing of Europe producing different groups with their conflicting accounts of the source and content of religious belief, the printed text and emergence of educated elites outside the church, and the steady weakening of distinctive tenets that had held firm for many centuries, particularly the belief in hell. If the reality of the next world impinged less upon human consciousness, then a greater atten- tion must fall upon this one. Christopher Hill has suggested 18 Atheism in Historical Perspective that while this hastened the rise of religious toleration, it must also have created a climate in which it became much easier to opt out by rejecting all forms of faith. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, Jews, and Quakers could gradually begin to learn co-existence, albeit with repeated lapses, but this cli- mate was one in which scepticism could also flourish.4 Not all religions could be true in everything, it was claimed, but they might all be false. During the era of the Reformations, atheism signalled not so much the intellectual rejection of fundamental Christian beliefs as a lack of piety. The ungodly were charged with atheism on account of the practical absence of religion from their lives. This is a point that will prove significant in sub- sequent criticism of the new atheism. The term ‘religion’ in its current usage is of relatively recent origin. It is a genus of which each of the world religions is taken to be a species. Our use of the concept now tends to block adherents of faiths into discrete groups, each determined by a different set of beliefs, texts, and practices. This creates some possible difficulties in isolating the beliefs and practices of a religion from those of a broader culture. Patterns of dress and eating, forms of family and social life, and observance of rituals and festivals are all integral to religion. To sequester the more cognitive dimensions of faith as the key index to religious identity is both to ignore its broad practical context, while also imposing a homogeneity upon adherents across space and time that simply does not exist. In this respect, it is instructive to remember that the term ‘religion’ previously designated not so much a distinct system of belief as the practice of piety. As the Harvard historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith famously argued, until the modern era the term ‘religion’ did not appear with an article—there were not religions in the singular and the plural. Instead religion tended to refer to the encounter with the divine, the practice of piety, and the forms of life that faith engendered. This is its meaning in Augustine and in Calvin’s Atheism in Historical Perspective 19 classical study, Institutes of the Christian Religion, where the Latin religio refers not so much to one world religion amongst others but to the piety of Christian people. Arguing that the term ‘religion’ evolved to isolate competing faiths in the mod- ern world, Cantwell Smith notes how its meaning has shifted from earlier periods.5 It may now be a term that we cannot do without—today’s awareness of religious diversity is greater than ever before and in many parts of the world Christians and Muslims understand themselves in relation to each other. But, in using it uncritically, we may be in danger of smuggling ques- tionable assumptions into our understanding of what religion typically involves and how it is widely expressed. At worst, it may occlude the significant overlap and commonality across faiths that can unite rather than divide people of sincere piety. We should not underestimate the difficulty experienced in earlier times by those who refused faith. It took some courage in face of a hostile majority. As David Wooton notes, the Reformation saw the rapid construction of an extensive vocab- ulary in both Latin and the vernacular to describe forms of unbelief and impiety.6 Heretics, deviants, and backsliders were denounced as atheist, deist, Epicurean, libertine, and antino- mian. In being named thus, one was perceived as a danger to ecclesial and civic life. The existence of genuine atheists was doubted by some. Others, like John Toland, may have advocated deist beliefs as a way of maintaining a deep scepti- cism without openly promoting atheism. Persecution was not uncommon. As late as 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, an Edin- burgh divinity student, was hanged on the road to Leith for expounding sceptical views on the authority of Scripture and the existence of God. The case shocked John Locke and other exponents of religious toleration.
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