Western Atheism: A Short History

"I brought this book in because when I was writing my book on atheism, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction , I was looking for some history. There was very little written about that. It may be a little bit different now, but this was the only decent book that I could find. It looks at atheism and its precursors in different periods: the pre-Socratic period, the Hellenistic period, and then going up to the Renaissance and Middle Ages. I’m not one of these people who can retain much memory of books, I don’t remember a lot of facts from them. I know from talking to others that a lot of people are like this. Most of them are a bit embarrassed about it, and don’t like to admit it. We all assume that other people are much better retainers of what they’ve read than we are ourselves. But what I do get from books, apart from information, is this: a good book changes the way I think in some way. I may not remember exactly what detail of the book did that, I may even misremember details of the book, but if it changes how I think, and informs my views, then it’s done something worthwhile. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Thrower’s book changed my view of the history of atheism in several ways. One was that it made clear to me that overt atheism is a reasonably recent phenomenon: it didn’t really emerge until quite late in the Middle Ages. There was a French priest, Jean Meslier—a play was written about his life a few years ago, quite an interesting one—and he’s held by some people to be the first overt atheist. He died in 1729. Baron d’Holbach is the other person who’s often claimed to be the first overt atheist. It’s quite striking, that you can’t unambiguously claim that anyone was ever atheist until that late, and interesting in itself. Going back to Hellenistic periods, it does seem that most thinkers believed in a supernatural world. You read Plato’s Dialogues , and Plato often talks about the gods, and the oracles. Some people— because I think they want to believe that Plato was a paradigm of rationality—assume this was a sop to the masses, but many scholars, perhaps the majority, think that’s just not true. Plato did believe those things: everybody did. Again, some people believe that educated Romans, the Roman aristocracy, were at least agnostic about the gods, but thought it important that the masses believed in them for Machiavellian reasons. That sounds implausible. It’s curious that open atheism of the kind we recognise is so recent a phenomenon. But then, in other ways, perhaps it isn’t curious. Even Richard Dawkins has argued that before Darwin you could be an intellectually respectable religious believer. We simply didn’t understand enough about the way the world worked to be able to make sense of it without assuming some kind of supernatural agency. Atheism is only really something that becomes intellectually complete and robust at a time when you can understand the world with a high degree of scientific sophistication."