The history of atheism, in large part, is a history of silence. The reason is obvious: until relatively recent times, charges of atheism carried with them the threat of excommunication, imprisonment, and death. Since people hide their true feelings to avoid fates far less severe than this, we can safely assume that atheism was far more common than a traditional reading of history otherwise suggests.[1]
While we’re all more or less familiar with the horrific practices of torture and execution carried out by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages (and beyond)—purportedly in service to the religion of the “Prince of Peace”—what is perhaps less known is that religious persecutions of “atheists” occurred frequently in the otherwise “freethinking” culture of ancient Greece. Fighting the gods—and challenging orthodoxy and tradition—has always come with substantial risk.
Some examples: The presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who proposed naturalistic explanations of the world, such as the Sun being merely “a fiery stone, and larger than the Peloponnese,”[2] was charged with impiety and had to flee Athens to avoid death; Socrates, famously, was executed by hemlock for “corrupting the young” and “not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things”[3]; and Protagoras was put on trial for simply writing “about the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist.”[4] Even if these condemnations were politically motivated, it’s still telling that accusations of atheism carried such strong weight as a capital offense.
Tolerance, it seems, is not a strength of the human species, even in the great city-state of Athens. Faced with these prospects, you can bet that countless historical atheists must have either concealed their true beliefs, or else expressed their sincere beliefs only to be killed or exiled or to have their books burned. And so we should be grateful for even the few scraps of text that we do have demonstrating courageous nonbelief.
But it remains the case that we don’t have much. No texts of the presocratics, for example, survive in their original or complete form; what we have are a small number of quotations and fragments preserved by later authors along with summaries and commentaries. Even for Epicurus—the founder of Epicureanism—writing later in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, who wrote an estimated 300-plus works, including a book titled “On the Gods,” only a few letters, fragments, sayings, and quotations survive.
Protagoras, Democritus, and Epicurus all wrote books specifically on the gods, of which none survive, yet we have the full text of Plato’s Timaeus, which argues for the existence of a creator god and, subsequently, was easily assimilated into the Christian worldview. This imbalance is a travesty of intellectual history.
Plato thought there were eternal, perfect, unchanging Forms of chairs and beds (in which all actually existing chairs and beds partake, whatever that means)—and we get to read all about it in perfectly preserved texts—but as to what Democritus, the father of the atomic theory of matter, had to say about the gods, we have next to nothing. This sure seems backwards.
This is all to say that any brief history of atheism in ancient Greece is going to be very sporadic and incomplete. But even what we do have shows an impressive range. Let’s then take a brief look at what the religious zealots had failed to erase—laying the groundwork for the great works of atheism to come.
The March Towards Atheism in Ancient Greece
In the previous chapter, “Breaking the Spell,” we saw that Xenophanes (c. 570 – c. 478 BCE), the first recorded religious skeptic in the West, broke the spell of religion and initiated the first “Copernican revolution” of human thought, in that, just as the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa, humans create gods in their own image and not the other way around. And once that dangerous idea gets out—the possibility that gods are simply imagined—it’s a few small steps to naturalism, agnosticism, and then outright atheism.
Taking the next step was Anaxagoras (c. 500 — 428 BCE), who, realizing that if, as Xenophanes supposed, the gods are simply mental projections, then natural phenomena, things like the sun and moon, are simply material bodies, and not actually gods (Helios and Selene). Anaxagoras would claim that “the sun is a fiery stone, and larger than the Peloponnese” and that “it is the sun that endows the moon with its brilliance.”[5] For these beliefs (which had their origins in the materialism of Thales and the Milesians), he was tried and condemned to death, for which he had to flee Athens for Lampascus.
Prodicus of Ceos (c. 465 BC – c. 395 BC) would carry on this tradition by noting that “all things which brought benefit to our human lives are numbered among the gods,”[6] thinking, like Anaxagoras, that the sun, moon, rivers, and springs were simply deified material bodies. But Prodicus took the further step of proposing that certain natural phenomena—deemed crucial for sustaining life—were worshipped for practical reasons, and sometimes out of desperation.
The gods were, by this time, coming under close scrutiny, and it was the Sophists—ancient teachers of rhetoric, argumentation, and virtue—who would take the next inevitable step. Once you realize, even if only potentially, that the gods are simply figments of the imagination, this could be enough to compel you to suspend judgment altogether—thus was born agnosticism. Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490 – 420 BCE), perhaps the first recorded agnostic in the West, wrote, “About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.” This, unfortunately, is the only surviving fragment from his book On the Gods.
It’s interesting to note that Protagoras, in his declaration of agnosticism, was simply echoing Xenophanes:
And as for certain truth, no man has seen it, nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and about all the things I mention. For if he succeeds to the full in saying what is completely true, he himself is nevertheless unaware of it; and Opinion (seeming) is fixed by fate upon all things.[7]
In other words, no one knows the first thing about the gods; Xenophanes and Protagoras were simply the first to admit it. And, Xenophanes reminded us, even if someone were to accidentally stumble upon the truth, humanity entirely lacks the means of confirming it.
The next logical step—in the march to outright atheism—was to admit that God or the gods exist, but that they remain uninterested in human affairs and do not take human form (again following Xenophanes, the spiritual ancestor of all religious doubters). Epicurus, the follower of the great atomist Democritus, who thought that “atoms and Void (alone) exist in reality,”[8] said that:
The gods do indeed exist, since our knowledge of them is a matter of clear and distinct perception; but they are not like what the masses suppose them to be, because most people do not maintain the pure conception of the gods.[9]
Epicurus would later say that “a happy and eternal being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; hence he is exempt from movements of anger and partiality, for every such movement implies weakness.”[10]
This, again, echoes Xenophanes: “There is one god, among gods and men the greatest, not at all like mortals in body or in mind.”[11]
We can detect here, despite the skepticism, a stubborn resistance to shed the idea of God entirely, but we should not be too surprised as to why this is the case. Without any notion of evolution to explain the complexity of life, ancient thinkers were holding onto the idea of a divine creator out of what seemed like a necessity. But unlike the orthodox theists, they were increasingly disconnecting this creative intelligence or force from any human-like form (as Spinoza, Einstein, and the pantheists, along with Thomas Paine and the deists, would later do).
This led to the final step: If some of the gods could be rejected, then perhaps all of the gods should be rejected—thus we have the formal birth of atheism. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would later say, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one God further.”[12]
Western History’s First Atheists and Religious Anthropologists
This final step—from doubting the gods, to suspending judgment, to stripping away all human qualities, to finally rejecting them outright—was left to Diagoras of Melos (c. 470 – c. 400 BCE), Strato of Lampascus (c. 335 – c. 269 BCE) and Theodorus of Cyrene (c. 340–c. 250 BCE), possibly the first well-known Western atheists in history. While we don’t have any direct works, we do have commentary from other authors, particularly Cicero.
For example, according to Cicero, “Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene held that there are no gods at all.”[13] Cicero further relates this story about Diagoras:
Diagoras, whom they call the Atheist, visited Samo-thrace, where a friend remarked to him: ‘You believe that the gods are indifferent to human affairs, but all these tablets with their portraits surely reveal to you the great number of those whose vows enabled them to escape the violence of a storm, so that they reached harbour safe and sound.’ ‘That is the case,’ rejoined Diagoras, ‘but there are no portraits in evidence of those who were shipwrecked and drowned at sea.’[14]
Diagoras hit upon an important point; if you examine any natural or human-caused disaster, you may very well find a small group who prayed desperately to be spared and who then “miraculously” survived. But you will also, in all likelihood, find a larger number who, despite their prayers, nevertheless swiftly met their deaths. Diagoras was therefore the first thinker to expose the tendency of the faithful to cherry-pick favorable outcomes as evidence of supposed “miracles,” while ignoring the statistical inevitability that some people, in large enough groups, will survive by chance alone, saved not by God but only by the law of large numbers.
Regarding Strato, Cicero says, “he proposes that all divine power lies in nature, which bears within it the causes of birth, growth, and diminution, but which lacks all sensation and shape.”[15]In other words, the god hypothesis is superfluous to an understanding of nature, anticipating the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace, when asked by Napoleon Bonaparte why God was absent from his astronomical works, said, echoing Strato, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
With Diagoras and Strato, we’ve come a long way in our march to atheism, but what is still needed—if in fact the gods do not exist, as the atheists maintained—is an account of the human propensity to nevertheless create them. In other words, we need an anthropology of religion, an explanation for the fact that virtually every culture, seemingly, feels the need to delude itself.
A possible answer is found in what is known as the Sisyphus fragment, preserved by the ancient skeptic Sextus Empiricus. In it, Critias (or Euripides, in one tradition) proposes the following hypothesis, which is worth reading in its entirety:
There was a time when the life of men was unordered
and bestial, a servant of strength,
when there was no prize for good men,
nor in turn was there chastisement for evil ones.
And then men seem to me to have established laws
as punishers, so that Justice might be a tyrant
<of everything altogether> and have violence as her slave,
and if anyone did wrong, he was punished.
Then, when the laws hindered them from openly
doing deeds through violence,
and they began to do [them] secretly, it seems to me that
at that time some shrewd man wise in judgment <first>
invented fear <of the gods> for mortals, so that
there might be some fear for evil men, even secretly
doing or saying or thinking <anything>.
Henceforth, then, he introduced the divine, [saying]
that there is a divine power flourishing with immortal life,
hearing and seeing with his mind, thinking very much and
being intent on these things, and possessing a divine nature,
[one] who hears everything spoken among mortals,
and will be able to see everything being done.
Even if you plan some evil [deed] in secret,
this will not escape the notice of the gods; for thought
is <wholly> in [them]. Telling these stories,
he introduced the sweetest of doctrines,
having covered the truth with a false story.
And he said that the gods dwell there, so that, speaking,
he could especially astound men, [in that place]
from where he knew that mortals’ fears come,
and good fortune for the miserable life,
from the vault [of heaven] above, where he saw there are
flashes of lightning and terrible crashes
of thunder, and the starry frame of heaven,
the beautiful embroidery of Chronos its wise craftsman,
from where the radiant red-hot mass of a star comes,
and the rainy thunderstorm goes forth onto the earth.
And he brought round these fears for men,
through these [stories] he established the divine power
in a fitting place with his speech,
and he extinguished disorder with fears.
Thus I think that someone first persuaded
mortals to think that there is a race of divinities.[16]
The theory of religion as a form of social and political control, through the fear of the gods, was thus born. Additionally, Euhemerus (late fourth century BCE) held that gods, and mythological tales more generally, are loosely based on historical events and figures but which inevitably become altered and exaggerated over time—likely for the purposes, again, of social manipulation and control (shedding potential light on the supernatural stories surrounding Jesus).
And so, we’ve run the full gamut of nonbelief hundreds of years before the emergence of Christianity—albeit much of it stamped out by dogmatic thinkers and religious zealots throughout the ages.
But let’s appreciate what the Greeks accomplished: In Ancient Greece, we find the origin of skepticism, agnosticism, atheism, and naturalism; early ideas of evolution (Anaximander thought humans evolved from fish); the idea that gods are psychological projections; and speculations on why and how religion was invented (social and political control, mostly). Not only is this an awesome achievement, but it should, at the very least, dispel the notion that religious doubt is a recent phenomenon.
In attacking or mocking these ideas, later authors, ironically, actually preserved them, lending historical credence to their irreligious assertions. Whether or not we listen to these suppressed voices of reason is another story altogether.
You may have noticed that, so far, we’ve had little to say about Athen’s most famous philosopher, Socrates. This is intentional. He deserves his own chapter, and his own place in history, as the ancient thinker who did the most to extricate morality from religion—firmly establishing moral philosophy as its own distinct discipline. It is to that great service, captured in the Euthyphro dialogue, that we now turn.
Notes
[1] See Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).
[2] Aristotle, On the Heavens (De caelo), II.13, 293b25–30, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. J. L. Stocks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
[3] Plato, Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), Apology 24b–c.
[4] Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 126.
[5] Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 86.
[6] Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44.
[7] Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 24.
[8] Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 93.
[9] Epicurus, The Art of Happiness, trans. George K. Strodach (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 155.
[10] Epicurus, The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, trans. Eugene O’Connor (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 21 (Doctrine 1).
[11] Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 23.
[12] Richard Dawkins, The Root of All Evil?, television documentary, Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2006.
[13] Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 3.
[14] Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 143.
[15] Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 16.
[16] Sarah Adison Phillips, “Critias of Athens and the Sisyphus Fragment” (honors thesis, Mississippi State University, 2018), 32.
Subscribe to Fighting the Gods
Enter your email below for the latest articles on the history of atheism and humanism.