This is a two-pronged question:
On a historical level, at what time do you think the clues appeared in the human knowledge base, and at what time it would be reasonable to expect people to pick up on the clues?
On a personal level, what where the first and most important clues to you?
Six fuckig years and not one damn pony!
My guess would be about 5sec after the first guy told the second guy about it, paused for a second, then started laughing.
Og - “Where did the world come from?”
Ug - “There is a magical spirit living in the sky that created it all and loves us, and all he asks is that we don’t eat pork.”
Og - “Seriously?”
Ug - “ha, no, but you totally fell for it.”
That’s I imagine it goes.
The problem with that question is that belief in “God”, as opposed to many gods is relatively recent.
Pretty much a growing awareness that there just wasn’t any evidence for any of the believers’ claims, and no evidence to use to choose which of the many, many mutually exclusive religions out there is the true one. Which together implies that none of them are. And also watching the behavior of those believers destroy their own claims that believing in God somehow made you moral.
Clues that there was no god? Do you mean no gods at all, or not this or that specific god? Because those would have different answers. There still isn’t actually evidence against a non-interventionist never-interventionist non-creator non-omnimax god. And I would say that the first evidence against specific gods varied wildly; typically depending on what they claimed about the world. There were probably some gods that were abandoned a long, long time ago because they failed to defend their chosen tribe sufficiently against their enemies.
None of it ever worked, and the logic never -ever- made sense. If prayer had worked, I’d be a theist.
If the word “god” in the OP is confusing, replace it with “supernatural being” or whatever you prefer, basically the usual center of religions. Doesn’t have to be a specific religion, I’m pretty sure they’re all wrong.
Clues that there was no god, or clues that there might not be a god? Because, afaik, it hasn’t been scientifically concluded even today that god doesn’t exist…merely that there is no evidence that there is a god or gods or other supernatural beings. Absence of evidence not being evidence of absence, and all that.
Assuming you mean when did people first start jibbing to the fact that there might not be a god…well, I think atheism in one form or another goes back for thousands of years, though obviously it was never a majority thought…least, not in any culture I’m aware of. But I’d have to say that sometime in the age of reason did people really start to question whether or not god really existed from the perspective of rational thought and not simply the same sorts of blind assertions that the folks advocating for a super natural being were using.
Well, it was a progression with me. I was raised a Catholic (being hispanic it’s hard to avoid a Catholic upbringing), but I remember one time at my grandmothers house. A lot of my VERY religious aunts, uncles, cousins and such were discussing, of all things, evolution, and I remember being interested in the discussion, since I had read some about it and it seemed very natural and plausible to me. I remember one of my aunts in particular talking about evolution, and what she was saying was completely wrong. I attempted to correct her, and (being a hispanic family) a ‘discussion’ ensued in which there was much screaming, shouting and general mayhem. Basically every one of my family were either completely against me (these were adults, mind, and I was maybe 11 or 12) or were completely staying out of the discussion, and in the end several of my aunts resorted to tears and weeping, and one of my uncles bopped me upside the head to shut me up…and at that point I realized that this whole Catholic/God thingy may not have much of a leg to stand on if adults had to resort to such tactics in a discussion with a bright (and handsome of course) child who had only a rudimentary knowledge of the subject (I DID have many years of Catholic school, so knew a bit more about the bible than seemingly many of my family did, even though they were extremely religious).
That memory has always stuck, and I think it was at that point that I started the journey away from religion. There were a lot of other events (learning some history about the Church, for instance, was a major factor), but that one always sticks out.
-XT
Historically, I have no idea, but I suspect atheism began to become more prevalent as science took off. Once science can start to explain the world around you, you have less need for supernatural explanations.
For me personally, the first time I remember was in Sunday School, around age 9-10. I grew up Catholic, in the 70s, when parts of the Catholic church were quite progressive. During the sermon, us kids would get taken out for a some age-appropriate group discussion. We were allowed to question and discuss very freely, and the more we discussed it, the less sense it made. One time I asked why God went to the bother of putting us on earth, and having us and die and suffer and all that. If there was something he wanted us to know or experience, why couldn’t he just insert it straight into our brains? The discussion leader had no answer for that, but one of the other kids in the group said: “It’s like when you play DnD. The DM can describe what’s happening, but it would have a lot more impact if he actually put you in a dank, smelly dungeon with a purple worm coming at you.” The image of God as a sadistic DM was hard to reconcile with the loving saviour version we were being taught.
Give us an idea of what you’re looking for, here… What are some of the current clues that there’s no god?
Ah! You clearly failed to obtain the necessary insight to work around this problem. As Emo Phillips says:
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle.
Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole
one and prayed for forgiveness.
:D:D:D
I’m sure there were atheists and agnostics at any point in human history, but I suspect it got a lot more common after the methodology of scientific inquiry was developed and accepted. Which I suppose puts it back to at least the ancient Greeks if not earlier.
Some time between Newton and Darwin. Closer to Darwin.
Fifth Grade Catholic School. God’s decisions didn’t make sense, and didn’t seem fair. The nuns were not amused.
As far as evolution is concerned, the default was atheism. Of all the bazillion of species that have ever existed, I’m quite sure that humans are the only who have even considered the possibility of a divinity. So the question should be: When was the first notion that there might be a god?
Probably one of the earlier fairly unambiguous items of evidence would have been watching the gods morph over time according to political needs. For example, it seems likely that the Greek pantheon used to be ruled by Cronus, not Zeus; the ancient Sumerian pantheon used to be ruled by Enki, not Marduk; and the ancient Egyptian pantheon was ruled by Horus, not Ra. If you look over the history of any god, you’ll see many changes to who he is and where he fits in the hierarchy of gods. It’s fairly likely that a lot of these changes were political, based on which city took prominence, which son of the king became the new king, who’d conquered your kingdom, what conqueror had been thrown out of the kingdom, etc.
It would be fairly apparent to anyone with a critical eye during one of these phases – particularly if they had any idea of older legends of the gods – that humans were creating a history of the gods out of wholecloth. Since the gods didn’t proceed on to destroy towns and farms for such insolence, it’s a decent bet that if there were gods, they weren’t the ones being spoken of. And if there were real gods anything like the gods being paraded about, they’d certainly get pissed by humanity worshiping all these made-up gods. Since they didn’t, they either didn’t care about humanity, or didn’t exist.
I think it started with gods that interact with man. The first gods were probably the unpredictable spirits of nature that didn’t care about humans at all, like the rain god, who decided when to drench people for totally selfish reasons. Then some guy thought up the idea that you could negotiate with a god to get it to act in your favor, or offend it and have your picnic spoiled. It was that god, that was first disbelieved.
There were some ancient Greek philosophers that were Atheistic and so were some of the Romans.
Nowadays you hear a lot about “The New Atheists”, supposedly atheists strident and harsh in their criticisms. But that sort of attitude goes way back. This is a favourite poem of mine.
Hap - Thomas Hardy - 1866
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
It is the unwillingness of faith holders to examine secular history that causes them to make claims of “New Atheism”.
Democritus might be said to be an ancient atheist. Quoting wikipedia…
Certainly it looks like he attributes no gifts of any gods as enabling human society.
Indeed. I’m just reading “Some Mistakes of Moses (1879)” by Robert G. Ingersoll. It’s hilariously insulting.
And then, there’s this passage that deals with the “strident and harsh” allegations directly:
I’d say the first time two civilizations interacted and they had vastly different Gods (not, for example, like when the Romans ‘adopted’ the Greek Gods, for instance).
Personally, I would say that there is no one religion worshipping the “God” that has stuck around since the beginning of human existence (say prehistoric times). That and the evolution of God and what he/she/it was responsible for keeps pace with the advancement of human thought.
God or gods is a concept of man’s that has never caught on for 100% of mankind. Your question assumes that men have always believed and then started disbelieving at some point. God is a superstition that has evolved over time and is still evolving. The clues about those different beliefs reality have changed as well.
The plethora of different beliefs and the adamance of those professing them. Somebody was flat out lying, that much was obvious,and most likely over 99% were lying considering how they all . Maybe that last 1% was lying too.
The first instant that some dude in some tribe thought up a diety, the rest of the world was atheistic to that specific diety (at least in the apatheistic sense). So each individual diety was massively disbelieved from the get-go and had to claw its way out of that hole.
If you’re wondering about the point when superstition in general began to look less appealing, I would say that it almost certainly directly correlates to the advancement of rational thought and scientific explanations in an area. Until somebody considers how lightning might happen without the intervention of the supernatural, the supernatural will remain the obvious explanation.