The history of Western atheism begins with an unsettling accusation: it is not God who created man in his image. It is man who created God in his. And the first thinker in the West bold enough to say it out loud was Xenophanes.

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570 – c. 478 BCE), wandering poet and presocratic philosopher, was born into a world suffocated by superstition. Gods roamed the sky, tearing up the earth with lightning bolts in fits of rage. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tornados, tsunamis—all were caused by the wrath of temperamental deities. Nature was equal parts awe-inspiring and terrifying—and always unpredictable.   

Against this backdrop, Xenophanes did something inconceivable: he sought out naturalistic, divinity-free explanations for worldly events (following the lead of Thales and the Ionian philosophers). “The sea is the source of water and the source of wind,” Xenophanes wrote. “The great sea is the begetter of clouds and winds and rivers.”

To the modern mind, this seems mundane. But in ancient Greece, it was blasphemy. Rivers and winds and clouds were the domain of the gods. The ancient Greeks already knew how storm clouds were formed: from the furious hands of Zeus. Lightning wasn’t a massive spark of electricity—it was a weapon, used to strike down enemies and nonbelievers—people like Xenophanes—at a moment’s notice.  

But Xenophanes didn’t flinch. He bravely offered a simpler—if less dramatic—explanation. Clouds, he suggested, form from water drawn up from the sea; rain then falls when that moisture grows heavy and returns to the earth, flowing back again through rivers. Xenophanes did not know the mechanics of the water cycle, but he suspected something crucial: that whatever processes governed the world, they didn’t require hotheaded gods. Nature operated on its own accord.

And what is true for the water cycle is true for all the world. “And she whom they call Iris [rainbows], she too is actually a cloud, purple and flame-red and yellow to behold,” Xenophanes proclaims, stealing yet another gem of nature from the realm of the gods. It was starting to look like “the gods” were simply temporary proxies for our ignorance—until better explanations could be discovered. 

The philosopher Anaxagoras pushed this further. Carrying on the work of Xenophanes, he later proposed that the sun and moon are also material bodies, and not actually the gods Helios and Selene. Anaxagoras claimed 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.” For these beliefs, he was tried and sentenced to death, fleeing Athens for Lampascus to avoid the hemlock that awaited him. Such was the fate for those who challenged religious orthodoxy. Modern science, of course, has vindicated him. 

Xenophanes never got into such trouble because his travels prevented him from being tied down to one place. He therefore wasn’t seen as a political threat. But his ideas were far more dangerous than calling the sun a hot stone. He pointed out something crucial about human nature that would call the gods into question ever since—the human propensity to attribute supernatural agency to things poorly understood. The gods, he noted, functioned not as explanations, but as admissions of ignorance. It was only when the gods were banished from the operations of the physical world that knowledge could progress.

But humans didn’t just use the gods as bad explanations for the weather. “Mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves are),” Xenophanes wrote, “and that they wear man’s clothing and have human voice and body.” The gods, he thought, were reflections of us—and not always in our most flattering light. “Both Homer and Hesiod,” Xenophanes complained, “have attributed to the gods all things that are shameful and a reproach among mankind: theft, adultery, and mutual deception.”

We make the gods do mischievous things to ease the burden of our own guilt. Consequently, our vices seem less morally incriminating, and the harm we inflict upon others appears justified. But this only hinders moral progress; it is only when ethics is reclaimed from the heavens that we can begin to treat each other as equals—as human beings belonging to a single race. The gods, Xenophanes knew, blocked such progress. 

As a traveling poet, Xenophanes saw something others could not. In contemplating the several gods of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, he noted something plainly obvious, yet concealed to more provincial minds: that the gods you worship look like you, and the gods of your neighbor look like your neighbor. Yet neither are any more real than the reflections in a mirror. 

“Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair,” Xenophanes wrote, “Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair.” This is not coincidental; it reflects a deep human need to project. Yet this is the first sign that the gods are inventions. Animals—if they could ponder their own existence and create art—would do the same. As Xenophanes snidely remarked: 

But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.

The implication is hard to escape. Gods are shaped by the minds that imagine them. If those minds were different, the gods would be too. 

And yet, Xenophanes stopped short of atheism. We should expect nothing less. Sixth-century BCE Greece was steeped in superstition, and Xenophanes had already gone further than most of his contemporaries. Still, he retained a belief in a single, supreme deity: “one god, among gods and men the greatest, not at all like mortals in body or in mind.”

Whatever this god was, it was no longer human. Stripped of form, personality, and myth, it marked a decisive shift: the beginning of a conception of the divine so abstract that its role in everyday life became increasingly unclear—and unimportant.

But there was still work to be done. The gods had been driven from nature—but they remained embedded in morality. That link would prove harder to break. Socrates was about to demolish it.

References

Freeman, Kathleen. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017.

Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.