But vocal atheists reinforce this binary of Godly vs. godless, too—the argument is just not as obvious. Theirs is a subtle assertion: Believers aren’t educated or thoughtful enough to debunk God, and if they only knew more, rational evidence would surely offset faith.

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To see what this attitude looks like in practice, it’s helpful to check out a new book, The Age of Atheists, by the British historian Peter Watson. The book interprets Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous 1882 declaration “God is dead” as a turning point in intellectual history: These words were a call to action for all the artists, writers, philosophers, and poets who tried to understand the world thereafter. Over the course of 626 pages, readers are taken on a whirlwind tour through the last 13 decades of European and American thought, touching on figures from Martha Graham and Piet Mondrian to William James and Jürgen Habermas. Watson’s version of Western intellectual history isn’t framed around economics or politics or the dialectics of power, which is a pretty radical move in a field filled with Marxists and Foucaultians and closeted Hegelians. Instead, he narrates history to answer one of the most basic questions of human existence: What’s out there, besides us? Is there such a thing as “God”?

And this yields fascinating results. To his credit, Watson includes all kinds of artists on his tour through godless thought. We learn that Isadora Duncan, a mother of modern dance, confessed that “the seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being.” There are tales of W.B. Yeats attending a séance where “he lost control of himself and beat his head on the table,” and Salman Rushdie almost dying in a car accident. The novels of Henry James are deconstructed to reveal religious themes, and the jazz musician Charlie “Bird” Parker is credited with the Beat-era advice to “quit thinking!”

These anecdotes are artfully woven into a broader narrative about how secular thought has evolved over time. Atheism hasn’t necessarily meant one thing throughout history, Watson argues. But in listing the many ways people have dealt with the “death of God,” he also seems to imply that atheism has covered all intellectual bases. There’s no longer any reason to believe in God or spirits or black magic, Watson appears to say—nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals have got it covered.

It’s difficult to summarize Watson’s story of atheism; after all, it took him hundreds of pages and dozens of thinkers to tell it. But, roughly, it goes something like this. Nietzsche wrote about the death of God at a time when many thinkers were starting to recognize a shift in the way Western culture related to Christianity, and throughout the West, his ideas gained traction. In Civil War-era America, this meant the rise of “pragmatist” thinkers: People like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey all realized that “‘ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like knives and forks and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world,’” Watson writes, quoting the Israeli academic Steven Aschheim. This idea was echoed by a group of Europeans that included Charles Baudelaire, Paul Cézenne, and Edmund Husserl. The latter’s brand of philosophy, called phenomenology, emphasized that a full experience of life is “not to be achieved suddenly through some ‘transcendent’ episode of a religious or therapeutic kind, but is more akin to hard work or education,” Watson says.