If I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street, I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

The first question to be resolved when discussing atheism is the basic one: what is an atheist?

Atheism is not an organized belief system the way Christianity or Islam is. An atheist can believe any number of things, ranging from the standard there probably arent any gods to there are no gods to god is dead (this one is purely philosophical, not the literal belief that a god existed, then died) to humanity is god (again, generally philosophical) and anything in between.

The general rule of atheists themselves divides atheism into two classes, strong atheism and weak atheism. A strong atheist believes that there is no god or gods. A weak atheist simply lacks belief in a god or gods. There is a difference; the former has a positive belief in the lack of a deity, while the latter have not rejected the existence in one, they just dont believe that it/they exist, because no evidence of their existence has been provided.

To begin with something simple, the 1913 edition of Websters Revised Unabridged Dictionary offers this: One who disbelieves or denies the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. Definitions of this kind are generally accepted, bearing in mind that disbelief can be interpreted to mean anything from simple lack of belief to active rejection of belief.

In short, someone being an atheist can mean a number of things, so before you ascribe beliefs they do not hold to someone (a good way to piss anyone off ), make sure you're on the same page!

open/close all folders

History

While many people, atheists and religious, see atheism as stemming from scientific developments and blame Darwins evolutionary theory for its spread, the truth is that what can be generally considered atheism is as old as the hills. Theres also the curious etymology of the word and its shift in usage. For a long time in history, atheist was the word used to describe people who believed in other gods rather than no gods. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the state supported religion was regarded as the one true and official religion. At the trial of Socrates, the great philosopher was called atheos because he did not subscribe to the Gods of the State (that is state recognized religion) and practised private beliefs. Likewise, in a curious irony, early Christians were persecuted by the Romans for being atheists as well since they did not subscribe to pagan beliefs. In medieval Europe, Catholics called heretics, Protestants and dissenting priests atheists simply because they did not accept official Church doctrine.

In terms of atheism as it means todayi.e., disbelief in god(s) to various extremesthe Greek Sophists and Atomists were more important. They were the ones who started criticizing Greek myths as merely elaborate fabrications of Kings and Emperors raised to Gods. They also started describing the natural world using language stripped of metaphors. To them, Greek myths and its multiple gods were merely anthropomorphized representations of natural phenomena and fancy metaphors. The philosopher Theodoros of Cyrene even exposed the Elusinian Mystery Cult and criticized religion as largely a money-making scam in terms that are fairly modern. One Diagoras of Melos was called "The Atheist", and possibly was the first philosopher in the West to explicitly disbelieve in gods. This more skeptical worldview can also be seen in the plays of Euripides, roughly contemporary to these changes. He was often accused by critics of lacking in piety; in his plays, gods and Greek heroes are often depicted in down-to-earth fashion, speaking everyday language, as opposed to the more religious plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Epicurus, who was inspired by these writers, charted out the first coherent materialist ideology. Although Epicurus acknowledged the existence of gods, by describing the problem of evil, he stated that if the gods existed, then it was unlikely that human suffering mattered to such beings, and that it made little sense organizing life and ethics based on a morality alien to humanity. He also denied the existence of an afterlife and stressed the importance and vitality of the visible world.

Its also important to note that such skepticism of religion was by no means a Western phenomenon. Buddhism and Jainism, for instance, are philosophies without a deity figure, though other sects approached something resembling monotheism later on. Hinduism had materialist schools such as the Carvaka, Samkhya and Mimamsa. In China, Confucius developed a philosophy of education, curiosity, and learning that explicitly distanced itself from metaphysical and spiritual questions, noting that such concepts, even if true, were generally available and valuable to the very few, and that society as a whole should be considered with materially improving life for everyone. Likewise, Charles Darwin, in describing his voyages to South America, stated that some native tribes did not even have a word for god and organized their society without any identifiable religion (and therefore cannot explicitly be called atheists, since they never believed in god to start with), noting that it refuted the idea that religion or belief was intrinsic or heritable, rather than cultural and acquired. During the golden age of the Arab world, several writers such as Omar Khayyam, Averroes, Ibn al-Rawandi and Abu Bakr al-Razi expressed ideas that stressed education, materialism and criticized infallibility of religious truths, expressing a naturalistic worldview that would supersede religious explanations. The freethinker Al-Maʿarri likewise regarded religion as a fable invented by the ancients. Even in the Catholic Church, Saint Augustine, a former Manichaean (an African heretical sect), stated that he considered the Bibles fantastic stories as largely embellished to be accessible to the common man. He dismissed literal interpretations of the Bibles account for creation, noting that as and when science advanced with superior explanations, it should supplant existing Biblical interpretations. This was the defense which Galileo (who was a religious man) usedunsuccessfullyin his trial argument for a heliocentric model of the solar system.note The dispute there being over whether the heliocentric model were a better explanation—most scientists at the time didnt think so.

Modern atheism first found voice in the course of The Enlightenment and The French Revolution, largely as a consequence of the debate about separation between church and state. It was accompanied by Deism at first. Philosophers such as Spinoza, Voltaire, and Rousseau advocated belief in a distant, immaterial, non-human deity who governed by naturali.e., scientificlaws. Deism attacked Christian intolerance and superstition and advocated science and democracy. The deists argued that religion should have no place in politics and that society should be free to discuss different ideas and should have total religious tolerance. In the Revolution, graffiti stating Death is an Eternal Sleep often defaced churches and cemeteries. Cathedrals and altar pieces were subject to petty and creative vandalism, giving free public expression to atheist ideas for the first time in Western history. During the Reign of Terror, atheist and deist revolutionaries briefly de-Christianized France entirely. Inspired by the Revolution, romantic poet Percy Shelley wrote a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism,note Though he was actually a pantheist. and the idea was common in Romantic, Revolutionary and Decadent circles. Politically and philosophically, Friedrich Nietzsche noted that with the Revolution, God is Deadi.e., the all-powerful ideal of God, even among liberal believers, was not the same in an age gradually supplanted by scientific, philosophical and political changes. He argued that the end of Christianity (or any other single belief as dominating Western culture) would lead to a period of nihilism from which people would then be free to create their own values and moral code. Charles Darwins theory of evolution sparked a major change in Victorian England and, much later, America, since it provided a scientific explanation for human origins that no longer required an anthropomorphic deity to shape it for human purpose.

By the dawn of the 20th Century, it became possibleat least in the Westto live in a society wherein religion did not play a dominant role. The resulting decline in attendance and social leverage of religion has since made atheism more and more common.