Origins of atheism: how and when was this philosophical current born?
When and how did the philosophical current of atheism appear? A summary of its historical roots.
In the same way that Christians believe in God, Muslims in Allah or Jews in Yahweh, there are people who do not believe in any of these. Atheism is the non-belief in deities or that they determine our destiny, fortunes and misfortunes.
This is nothing new, of course, but it is surprising that, when we delve into the origins of atheism, we see that it is a rather ancient religious stance..
Below we are going to take a journey through time, discovering who the first atheists were philosophically speaking and how throughout history non-belief has been treated.
- Related article, "The origins of religion: how did it appear and why?"
What are the origins of atheism?
Although the word "atheism" is relatively modern, having its origin in the 16th century and being, at the time, a neologism coming from the ancient Greek "átheos" (without god, denial of god), the truth is that the philosophical position behind the term is very old. Nowadays we understand the word atheism as the ideological and religious position in which the existence of god, deities or entities that determine people's fate is denied or not accepted, a definition that dates back to the 18th century, when the word went from being an insult to a "positive" concept.
Surprising as it may seem, the idea that gods or deities do not exist seems to be as old as religions themselves. Anthropologically, the origins of atheism have been investigated in an attempt to discover whether in the most "primitive" cultures there were divergent positions with respect to the deity of the tribe, or whether they were critical of what the other members of the group believed. Although research has been very extensive, it is difficult to know to what extent non-belief appeared in these cultures.
What is certain is that, of course, the belief that atheism, as a philosophical stance, has its origin in the Enlightenment is false.. Although the Enlightenment undoubtedly implied a greater freedom of expression in which religious matters were also included, the truth is that we can find atheistic positions as early as the Ancient Ages, with civilizations such as Greece, Rome, China and India. Below we will see how non-belief has been established in the philosophical thought of several cultures.
1. Ancient Age
As a philosophical current, atheism began to manifest itself at the end of the 6th century B.C. in Europe and Asia.. At this time, in Classical Greece, the word "átheos" already existed, although with a definition different from the one we give it today, appearing between the 5th and 6th centuries BC. It referred to a person who had ceased his relations with the gods and, in many occasions, it was used as an insult, meaning an evil person, who denied or disrespected the gods.
We have an interesting atheist antecedent in Classical Greece, with the case of Socrates. Although his atheism could not properly be considered non-belief in god, he did doubt the existence of the gods. questioned the existence of the ancestral gods.. It is for this reason that Socrates was executed by making him drink hemlock. Likewise, it must be said that the execution of Socrates, rather than for heresy, was due to political reasons, since, relatively speaking, in Classical Greece atheism was more or less tolerated, depending on the polis and the historical moment.
Many other classical philosophers resisted the belief in divinities. Another thinker, Carneades of Cyrene, who headed Plato's Academy in the second century B.C., considered belief in gods illogical.. Some time later, Xenophanes of Colophon criticized the idea of anthropomorphic gods, considering them a human invention and corrupt. Likewise, it should be said that Xenophanes was a proponent of pantheism, i.e., the position that everything is found in all things and is, technically, a religion, in its own way.
Diagoras of Melos got quite a bad reputation for being considered the first atheist in Classical Greece.. The atomists Leucippus and Democritus later defended a materialistic vision of the world, in which there was no room for the intervention of the gods. We also have other figures considered atheists, or at least defenders of the position that the deities could not exist, such as Anaximenes, Heraclitus and Prodicus of Ceos, also supporters of a completely materialistic point of view and without thinking about the spiritual.
Leaving aside the Western world, we move on to Ancient India, a place that was the cradle of numerous philosophical schools in which an atheistic vision of life was promulgated. There also arose the Chárvaka, an anti-theistic philosophical current, one of the most explicit of the time, and Jainism, which conceives the idea that the world is an eternal element without beginning.
In China we have Taoism, which defends the non-existence of a god.. Taoists consider that a superior deity is unnecessary, since the human being harmonizes perfectly with nature.
In this same country we have Buddhism, in which the existence of a single founding God is not conceived, being the teachings of Gautama Buddha the ones that serve as psychological and spiritual training to find oneself internally, although they do believe in deities and other supernatural entities, which we cannot speak of atheism in the strict sense.
2. Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation
In the Middle Ages atheism was frowned upon in the West. So bad that there were not many figures who dared to make their atheistic positions known; there was fear of having to defend themselves before a tribunal of the Inquisition and end up confessing under the most creative tortures. Freedom of thought was conspicuous by its absence, and if it was already a scandal to believe in a god other than the Christian, to question the existence of a creator was the last straw.
Fortunately, the situation changed at the beginning of the Renaissance, followed by the Protestant Reformation. A greater criticism of religious institutions and beliefs arose, progressively shaping the idea of modern atheism. In fact, the term "athéisme" was first coined in France in the 16th century, used as a form of accusation for those who rejected God or divinity in their intellectual debates.
Although there was considerably more freedom of thought than during the Middle Ages, it would not be with the onset of the Protestant Reformation and, later, the Enlightenment. Being a non-believer was still frowned uponThere is evidence that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word "atheist" was used exclusively as an insult that no one wanted to receive, since there were many who ended up being executed on suspicion of atheism, among which we can find the following cases:
- Étienne Dolet: strangled and burned in 1546 for atheism.
- Giulio Cesare Vanini: strangled and burned in 1619 for atheism.
- Kazimierz Łyszczyński: beheaded after having his tongue torn out with red-hot iron and his hands slowly burned in 1689 for writing a philosophical treatise questioning the existence of god.
- Jean-François de la Barre: tortured, beheaded and his body burned, accused of destroying a crucifix.
As for those accused of atheism who were saved, we can find great figures of Western thought such as the English materialist Thomas Hobbes, who managed to save himself by denying the charges of atheism. The reason for the suspicion was that his theism was unusual, since he considered that God had to be material. In 1675 the philosopher Baruch Spinoza had to renounce to publish his work Ethics since it was considered blasphemous and atheistic by theologians, along with other banned works.The theologians considered it blasphemous and atheistic, along with other banned works that only became known posthumously.
3. The Age of Enlightenment
The Enlightenment is one of the most important cultural periods in the West.It brought with it great scientific and philosophical advances, along with greater freedom of thought. This era is traditionally associated with the phrase "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it", supposedly said by the French philosopher Voltaire.
Denis Diderot, one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment and editor of the best-known work of popularization of knowledge of the time, The Encyclopediawas accused of being an atheist for challenging the prevailing religious dogmas, especially the Catholic one. In his work he writes that reason is the virtue of the philosopher, while grace is the virtue of the Christian. Grace determines the actions of the Christian and reason determines those of the philosopher. For opinions like this Diderot was imprisoned for a brief period.
With the passage of time the word atheism was no longer a dangerous accusation.. By the 1770s, the act of questioning the existence of God, although, of course, with its limitations, was more acceptable. The first philosopher of the time to deny the existence of God and to make an apology for his atheism was Baron d'Holbach, with his work published in 1770 Système de la Nature. Along with philosophers such as Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Benjamin Franklin, they criticized religion.
But despite the greater freedom of expression, censorship and repression were still in force.. D'Holbach published his works under the pseudonym Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud to avoid religious persecution. In addition, his works and those of several of the earlier philosophers appeared in the Index Librorum Prohibitoruma compilation made by the Holy See which listed those books that should not be read under any circumstances if one wanted to be a good Christian. This book had editions until 1948, being suppressed in 1966.
Conclusions
The origins of atheism are very deep and extensive if we take a historical perspective. Surely, the ancestral cultures manifested, in one way or another, some critical opinion with the belief of the group deity.Although it is difficult to be sure of this since, on many occasions, the cultural remains that reach us from our most ancient ancestors are offerings to gods or other ritual objects.
What we can be sure of is that atheism, as a religious and philosophical position, did not originate in the Enlightenment, but was already well established in the Ancient Ages. Both in Europe and in Asia the critical positions against the ancestral gods had their own schools, more or less accepted depending on the city-state or the historical moment they were living.
With the arrival of the Middle Ages came the darkest and darkest repression against any idea contrary to the idea of the Christian God, and only with the arrival of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and, finally, the Age of Enlightenment, a little more freedom would be gained.
Bibliographical references:
- Armstrong, K. (1999): A history of God. Londres: Vintage. ISBN 0-09-927367-5
- Berman, D. (1990): A history of atheism in Britain: from Hobbes to Russell. Londres: Routledge. ISBN
- 0-415-04727-7.
- Buckley, M. J. (1987): At the origins of modern atheism. Nueva Haven (Estados Unidos): Yale University Press.
- Drachmann, A. B.: Atheism in pagan antiquity [1922]. Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1977 (reimpresión de la edición de 1922). ISBN 0-89005-201-8.
- McGrath, A. (2005): The twilight of atheism : the rise and fall of disbelief in the modern world. ISBN 0-385-50062-9.
- Thrower, J. (1971): A short history of western atheism. Londres: Pemberton. ISBN 1-57392-756-2.
- Purzycki, B. y Sosis, R. (2019). Resistance, Subversion, and the Absence of Religion in Traditional Societies.
(Updated at Apr 12 / 2024)