We saw above how Psalms 14 and 53 spoke of scepticism in the time of the Old Testament, although we know very little about its origins or its nature in that world. But once one enters the speculative world of the Greek philosophers, then names, specific writings, and arguments appear for our examination. In fact, one of the extraordinary things about the intellectual freedom of classical Greece is that not only did you have writers such as Hesiod inventing theology and discussing the nature of the myths, attributes, kinships, and reputed antics of the Homeric gods in his Theogony(circa sixth century BC), and – centuries later – Roman scholars such as Cicero exploring the relationship of the Greco-Roman pantheon with those of Egypt and elsewhere, but you had all sorts of divergences from orthodoxy. We saw how the idea of the “Logos”, 500 years before Christ, spoke of one great intellectual principle beyond the gods of Olympus. And there were also classical thinkers who argued that religion in its entirety was a human invention.
Philosophical schools, such as the Sceptics and the Cynics, have bequeathed their names and styles of thinking to the modern world, especially in the West, and have become embedded in the phraseology of everyday speech. For, religion apart, who is not sceptical about the claims of high-pressure salesmen and cynical about the promises of politicians? Pyrrho, Diogenes, Critias, Prodicus of Ceos, and others taught us how to articulate doubt, and, if we value freedom of thought, we should be eternally grateful to them. Yet by the same argument, we must be sceptical about the pronouncements of agenda-driven ideologists of all kinds (including religious ones) and healthily cynical about those pundits who loudly affirm that man is the measure of all things.
The school of atheistic thinking which had, perhaps, the longest-running presence in scientific thinking is that of the atomists. Somewhere about 440 BC, the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus challenged the prevailing ideas about the nature of matter. For what if things did not, as thinkers such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, and others suggested, all derive from water, air, earth, or fire? Or, as Aristotle (after Empedocles) would argue in his De Caelo (“On the Heavens”) around 340 BC, from all four of these primary principles of wetness, windiness, heaviness, or fieriness combined, and interacting together? Water, however, did seem the best candidate for being the key element, for it could be a solid, a liquid, or an airy vapour. Yet what if all these men were wrong, and the elements were not manipulated by some Great Principle to form wood, stone, metal, or flesh? What if the visible elements were themselves the concoctions of even more basic units, and what if there were no guiding rules or geometry of combination, and everything happened by chance? And what if our seeing order in the natural world were itself no more than a chance, temporary concatenation, with all the bits seeming to come together during the brief duration of our lives, and when our bodies just happened to exist?
And no, this assessment does not come from a latter-day New Atheist out to liberate blinkered humanity from the bondage of priestcraft. In fact, St Paul himself could no doubt have read such things in the public library in Tarsus, and certainly when he was in Athens or Rome, had he cared to do so; for this definitive statement on atomic atheism was published by Titus Carus Lucretius as De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) around 60 BC.
Indeed, you only need to read Lucretius to realize how old hat so many assertions of the New Atheists really are. For Lucretius said it all: men invent the gods in their own image, while prayer, sacrifice, public religion, and spirituality are no more than a human contrivance to ease our fears and sufferings. Nature, as a thing of order, is also an illusion. There are no elements or enduring structures “out there”, only atoms. And these tiny little objects are all alike (not like the atoms of modern chemistry), and the way in which they stick together or fly apart at any one time is due to pure accident. And they make up our bodies and our world, and produce a mixture of semi-permanence or transience depending entirely on the luck of the moment. And we silly humans think it all makes sense!
As with so many ancient books, manuscript copies of De Rerum Natura went missing during the centuries following the end of the Roman Empire as a central cultural and administrative entity, as Goths, Vandals, Muslims, and others invaded and desecrated the Balkans, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Spain. And, it must not be forgotten, fanatical Christian outbursts against pagan temples and their libraries, such as that of AD 391, made their destructive contribution. Then the caliph Omar set fire to what was left of the great library at Alexandria in AD 642 as part of Islam’s original expansion out of Arabia, and goodness knows what vanished in this and other orgies of anti-classical destruction around the Mediterranean. Lucretius survived as a name and as a body of very reprehensible ideas, as did numerous other scholars, scientists, and philosophers.
It says something about the eclectic reading habits of medieval monks, however, that when De Rerum Natura did resurface, in 1417, it was in the library of a German monastery. And yes, it was very naughty reading, yet further manuscript copies were made, circulated, and finally printed for widespread distribution in editions of 1473, 1495, 1500, and thereafter. And De Rerum Natura has been in print ever since. So much for uniform church suppression of ideas in the Middle Ages! Indeed, sceptical ideas were even known in the Islamic world, where the twelfth-century Spanish Muslim philosopher Averroes, a disciple of Aristotle, denied that God had created the world and even argued that individual human souls perished after death. Though the unorthodoxy of Averroes’s ideas meant that he was to have little influence upon Islamic thought, he was soon translated into Latin by Michael Scot in the early thirteenth century, to be avidly debated in the universities of medieval Europe, invariably causing great controversy.
Where we differ from the classical and medieval world, however, is in our use of the term “atheism” in its literal meaning. Nowadays it is taken to signify a rejection of any belief in a supreme being. Yet in his Apologia around AD 140, the early Christian theologian Justin Martyr made the seemingly incredible claim that all Christians were accused by the Greeks of being atheists. So what on earth could he mean? Very simple, in fact. In the Greek, the word “atheist” (atheos) meant “denying the gods” in the plural. So in the strictly literal sense, a devout Christian might, after Justin, consider himself to be an atheist, because in his declared following of God in the singular, he rejected the idea of there being many gods. An interesting definition, in fact.
It would be incorrect to assume, however, that the early Christian church was one simple, unified happy family where everyone thought the same. Indeed, as early as the time of St Paul’s letters to the young churches of Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessaly in the AD 50s, within twenty years or so of the crucifixion, Christians were up to various activities that were not canonical, and which St Paul chose to correct in his powerfully argued letters. Christians, for instance, could not slink off to pagan temples or feasts, or combine their faith with trying to keep on the right side of false heathen gods. And by the fourth century ad, the leaders of the church were holding summit meetings in Nicaea and elsewhere to formulate what was and was not canonical Christianity, based upon careful critical studies of the New Testament books. One could not, for instance, give Satan a power equal to that of Jesus, or believe that ancient secret rituals, occult insights, or extra-Christian forms of gnosis – wisdom – would get you into heaven, as the Gnostics had claimed. Only faith in Jesus would do that, as the Gospels tell us.
And then, when the great universities of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe began to teach the intellectual techniques of first Socrates and then Aristotle, using reason, logic, and debate to get at the truth, all manner of interesting ideas began to spring forth. And what if logic and debate led you to unbelief, as it did with the followers of Amaury of Paris, who died around 1207? For Amaury came to deny the immortality of the soul, and argued not for the creator–sustainer God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but for a pantheistic world-soul deity. Yes, you got into serious trouble, and if you persisted, you got burned, as did his followers, the Amalricians, in 1210. But the stark fact of the matter is that medieval Europe was in no way innocent of unbelief, even before Lucretius was rediscovered in 1417. Yet as long as a medieval academic avoided a direct confrontation and a denial of God, Christ, or salvation, what he said could often be absorbed into a wider philosophical picture. And while we no longer burn heretics in the West today, we are by no means as free or as liberal as we might like to think. Try, for instance, holding onto your research funding and career prospects if you are a modern-day earth scientist or independent film-maker who dares express serious scepticism about global warming! (And let me emphasize that I am not in this context making any remarks about global warming as such, but rather about what happens to “heretics” who express dissent from certain modern-day orthodoxies.)
And when one enters the sixteenth century, one finds not only the word “atheism” firmly rooted in the English language, but even various personages being designated sceptics and mockers of religion. Queen Elizabeth I’s reign saw a veritable rash of them. The poet Christopher Marlowe was rumoured to be one, as also Sir Walter Ralegh and the supposed members of his “School of Night”. The area around Sherborne, Dorset, was believed to contain a nest of atheists, for that is where Sir Walter had a country seat. In 1568, the English Bible translator Miles Coverdale condemned in his Hope of Faithfull these contemporary unbelievers who lived only to eat, drink, and have a good time “for tomorrow we shall die: which all the epicures protest openly, and the Italian aetheoi”. And by “epicures”, of course, Coverdale meant followers of the Greek sceptic Epicurus, whose school of thinking found its fullest expression in Lucretius.
One wonders, indeed, how far Elizabethan atheism was in itself a product of the shock of fresh knowledge, coming either from new geographical discoveries or from the burgeoning number of books – including De Rerum Natura – which the printing press was making generally available. The Tudor and Jacobean lawyer and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon seemed to think so, suggesting in Book I, Section 3 of his Advancement of Learning (1605) that “a little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a further proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to religion”.
And Tudor England, along with Italy and Germany, saw a mushrooming of magic and spirit communication, especially among the educated classes. Sir Walter Ralegh’s associate Dr John Dee openly attempted to commune with spirits in spite of explicit biblical condemnation of the practice. For in summoning up the spirits of the dead, or the primordial spirits of the earth, was not one denying the saving grace of God, as when King Saul persuaded the Witch of Endor to illicitly summon up the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel in the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel?
Nor did the Bible lack its mockers. Sixteenth-century sceptics, including those of Ralegh’s school, expressed doubts that the world could have been made from nothing in a spontaneous act of creation as described in Genesis. For does not everything come from something else? Likewise, the textual and narrative anomalies and ambiguities of Scripture were readily pounced upon. Where, for instance, did the women come from who married the sons of Adam and Eve, so that they could beget the patriarchs? And where did all the waters that occasioned Noah’s Flood suddenly come from and go back to? And who had ever seen a dead man or woman come back to life?
So all these matters, and many more, were in discussion in avant-garde circles long before 1600, and to give the impression that atheism, scepticism, materialism, and unbelief did not exist until modern times is patently incorrect.