Not a tread for witnessing or debating the merits of religion or athiesm, but rather a straight factual question.
Reading history books and ancient texts, I get the impression that in the ancient world pretty well everyone believed in the supernatural and in god or gods. Obviously, at some point this all changed, and disbelief in the supernatural arose at least among some.
My question is this: what was the earliest written account that would suggest that someone believed that there was no god or gods?
I’m guessing it would be some Greek philosopher, but I seem to recall that Confucious was less than convinced about the supernatural. Who was the earliest verifiable athiest?
I hate to be a jackass, and this will undoubtedly cause me to make a variety of comical typos, but it’s “atheism.”
To directly answer your question, it sort of depends on your definition. There was unquestionably a time when human beings existed, probably very early in our history, but had not quite gotten to the level of tribal organization and shared lore and history that would have led to a belief in theistic beings.
Non-theistic belief systems go back at least as far as the beginnings of Buddhism, Taoism, and other such systems that are, at least technically, NOT based on belief in gods.
In Western civilization, Epicureas was an atheist; he openly didn’t believe in the pantheon of Greek/Roman gods, or at least didn’t believe they WERe gods, but rather were mortal beings. He was born somewhere in the vicinity of 340 BC, so that is probably the best answer to your question.
Once we get rolling with Christianity, though, your general impression is probably correct at least in the Western world; virtually everyone believed in some sort of god or gods, and if anyone came to doubt them they likely would have kept their yaps shut. There have always been people who were indifferent to the whole idea, but outright atheism, an active belief that there is NO such thing as a god, probably does not predate the Enlightenment as an openly held beleif in the Western world. In the East, as I said, there have long been “religious” traditions that did not necessitate belief in a God.
As far as Buddhism goes, my impression was that it was not particularly “atheistic”. It is true that some forms of philosophical Buddhism don’t require any gods for salvation, but that isn’t the same thing as denying they exist - indeed I seem to recall that some strains of Buddhism consider that ‘being a god’ was somewhat unfortunate, as it was only humans who have the opportunity for nirvana.
Moreover, in many forms of Buddhism various supernatural beings that act more or less like saints and gods show up. Same in Taoism.
Taoism is like Buddhism in that philosophical Taoism has no particular need of gods or other supernatural entities.
So far, Epicureas seems the best bet; what about Confucious? Any ancient Egyptian expressions of non-belief? I suppose earlier expressions are unlikely, as it was mainly the priesthood who could write.
It’s Epicurus. You might want to check out the Carvakas, and earlier than them, the Jains of India. The Carvakas seem to have been pretty strict materialists, and while the Jains believe in supernatural beings, I don’t think they think they believe they’re gods.
If you’re looking for Greeks before Epicurus, some of the Sophists might fit your category. Protagoras was an agnostic…he said the existance or lack thereof of the gods was unknowable. Prodicus (who was executed by Athens for his teachings) said that the gods were our conceptions of what we considered important. We know we need the sun, for instance, so we give it divine traits and say there’s a god of the sun. There was also Critas, who said that the gods were created by the state as a means of social control.
I just finished teaching the Apology in my philosophy class, and Meletus, upon cross examination by Socrates, accuses Socrates not just of not believing in the Athenian Gods, but in being an out-and-out atheist.
Meletus would hardly make such an accusation if atheism were unknown at the time.
Now that I give it some thought, Democritus (who predates Epicurus by around 100 years) is generally regarded as being an atheist, based on his thorough-going materialism.
Interesting article on Greek atomism. A cursory google search fails to turn up anything on Democritus that was explicitly atheist, but his philosophy can, I think, be fairly describe that way. If you believe everything is atoms and void, that doesn’t leave much room for a god or gods. Certainly many people considered Democritus atheist. His explicator, the Roman poet Lucretius, was openly agnostic and disbelieved in the state religion. “If the Gods exist, they are far away.”
What’s that one quote about religious belief being something-or-other to the common folk, and useful to the powerful? I can’t remember enough of it to Google it. I’ve always thought it sounded apocryphal, as it’s usually attributed to a famous Roman, but I’ve never bothered to do the legwork on it.
Thank you. That’s not the version I was remembering; what I saw was evidently a later bastardization of that obvious original. It credited Cicero or Pliny or somebody, and referred to religion in general, not Roman worship specifically. But that’s obviously the source.
