Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (25 page)

Some accounts have the Athenians rounding up all of Protagoras’s books and burning them in the central agora. If true, they didn’t do a very good job of that either: Over a century later, the agnostic writings of Protagoras were still being read and discussed. (I describe a fragment of one such work in
Chapter 10
.)

Guessing why people invented gods — Euhemerus

One of the most interesting job descriptions in ancient Greece belonged to the court mythographer, whose job included gathering stories of the gods and demigods and bringing them to life in narratives, poems, sculptures, paintings, and other artistic media. A bit of cultural anthropology was in the mix, too, because mythographers traveled into the hinterlands to gather these tales and brought them back to the court.

Euhemerus was a mythographer for the court of Cassander, King of Macedonia, about a hundred years after Protagoras. As you may imagine, his work gave him plenty of time to think about the gods, and he developed the earliest known explanation of how belief in gods actually began. Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, and all the rest of the Greek pantheon of gods were originally historical kings and heroes, he said. They were worshipped in their lifetimes, as kings and heroes tend to be. After they died, these cults of hero worship naturally took on supernatural dimensions, and boom! — you have the gods of Olympus.

“Euhemerism” came to describe any attempt to explain supernatural beliefs in natural terms. Even the early Christian fathers did it, including Clement of Alexandria, who patiently explained to a pagan believer that his gods were once just men like himself.

It’s fun, and not too hard, to imagine the very next sentence out of the pagan’s mouth.

Changing everything: Lucretius and On the Nature of Things

If you’re going to give the world just one book, it may as well change everything. De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the sole surviving work by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, was arguably just that kind of book. Written in the first century BCE, it was an epic poem intended to keep the ideas of Epicurus alive, especially the importance of freeing the human mind from the fear of gods and death.

Nature does all things spontaneously, Lucretius said, without the “meddling of gods.” The universe is made of atoms moving through space, colliding, connecting, and splitting apart again, making all that we see. There’s no guiding intelligence and no master plan. Unhappiness comes mostly from worrying about the gods. Death is the end, and it constitutes total peace, with no “frowning ministers of hate in hell” waiting to torment selected souls.

Lucretius didn’t deny the existence of gods outright; he simple said that if they did exist, they were so blissed out that they didn’t bother with things like universe creation or rewarding and punishing human behavior.

With the help of a fortunate Catholic obsession — see
Chapter 6
for more on that —
De rerum
survived all the way to 1417, when a book hunter in a monastery in Italy discovered the very last crumbling copy. Recopied and disseminated throughout Europe, many of the great thinkers of the following centuries credited the book with revolutionizing the way they saw the world. Many historians today believe it had a profound impact in jump-starting the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and even the whole modern world.

Not a bad life’s work.

Naming names: Sextus Empiricus and Cicero

Most of the names of atheists and agnostics in the Greco-Roman world, especially those who didn’t write (or had their works destroyed), would have been lost forever if not for a couple of well-placed mentions by other writers. In an essay called “On the Nature of the Gods,” Roman philosopher and orator Cicero (106–43 BCE) listed several Greek atheists and agnostics who were still spoken of in shocked whispers during his time, including Protagoras, Diagoras, and Theodorus.

More than 200 years later, in his essay “On the Gods” — apparently they didn’t put much creative effort into their titles — Greco-Roman philosopher Sextus Empiricus listed five Greeks who he said were the most prominent atheists of their time, including Protagoras, Diagoras, Theodorus, and Euhemerus.

If not for these two prominent listings of ancient atheists, the 21st century might never have heard of these courageous and intelligent people. I wonder how many more were born, lived, doubted, and died in this period of wondering and questioning, but didn’t have a Cicero or Sextus to record their thoughts.

But enough of their roll call — what do Sextus and Cicero themselves think about gods?

Like many Skeptic philosophers of the time, Sextus suspended judgment, believing that to be the surest route to peace of mind, his ultimate goal. But Cicero, in the same essay in which he named those names, slipped his own wonderings in: “Do the gods exist or do they not?” he asks. “It is difficult, you will say, to deny that they exist. I would agree, if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly, but in a private discussion of this kind it is perfectly easy to do so . . . I confess that many doubts arise to perplex me about this, so that at times I wonder whether they exist at all.”

Chapter 5

Going Medieval

In This Chapter

Maturing traditions of doubt in India and China

Shaking a finger at the faith in medieval Islam

Freezing out the gods in Iceland

Inquiring about the Inquisition

P
ick up almost any collection of atheist and agnostic writing through the ages and you’ll get the impression that religious doubt takes a thousand-year holiday between the fall of Rome (fifth century) and the Renaissance (15th century). True, finding atheists in the Middle Ages isn’t easy, especially in Europe, where the Christian church was as much a political force as a religious one. Any challenge to orthodoxy during that time wasn’t just considered blasphemy but was also a kind of political treason that often separated heads from bodies.

But just as in every other place and time, unorthodox opinions including atheism were definitely present in the Middle Ages. You just have to know where to look.

A good place to start is outside of Europe, where (as I describe in
Chapter 4
) more than one advanced civilization already had a well-developed tradition of atheist thought that continued to thrive while European atheism went mostly silent.

This chapter checks in on India and China, two of the best such examples, to see how atheist thought developed through the Middle Ages. I also visit the Islamic Golden Age, during which the Arab world zooms past napping Europe in science, literature, medicine, the arts, and philosophy. This astonishing period in Arab history includes an explosion of secular ideas, complete with the rejection of belief in Allah and criticisms of Muhammad that would make an ayatollah faint.

Iceland also gets a nod, as the hero of a 13th-century saga turns Psalm 14 upside down, declaring that it’s belief in gods, not disbelief in them, that makes a person foolish.

Finally I visit the Inquisition, a 600-year effort to ferret out heretics that once in a while turned up an actual atheist instead.

Continuing to Doubt in Medieval India

The common idea that India is an intensely theistic country is probably a result of
polytheism
(the worship of multiple gods). In the West, from the Sistine Chapel to Christ of the Ozarks, you can see depictions of the one God, or of his helpfully tangible son. Polytheists have an awful lot of gods to honor, so seeing hundreds or even thousands of gods and demigods colorfully carved and displayed in every nook and cranny of the Indian subcontinent is common. The result is the strong perception that everyone and everything in India is connected to god belief.

But as I describe in
Chapter 4
, atheist and agnostic schools of thought coexisted with theistic ones throughout India’s history, not just as a fringe philosophy, but right at the heart — sometimes even the head — of each major religion. That certainly continued throughout the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages was a great time to be an atheist in India. Atheist philosophy was a full partner in the conversation, and nontheistic schools even came to dominate the country for much of this period. As a result, Sanskrit — the main language for religious texts in India — ended up with a larger collection of atheist literature than any other ancient language, with the possible exception of Chinese.

The following sections explore the surprisingly strong role of atheism in medieval India.

Putting atheist Hinduism front and center

Even after accepting the idea of an atheist Hindu, many people still picture a small, tolerated group on the sketchy outskirts of a great religion. But the branches of Hinduism that rejected gods or declared them irrelevant were among the leading Hindu schools of thought for centuries.

The nontheistic Samkhya school, which I introduce in
Chapter 4
, grew to become one of the primary expressions of Hinduism in early medieval times.

Samkhya Hindus weren’t completely naturalistic in their beliefs. They saw the universe as having two realms — nature and spirit — but argued that there was really no place for an
Ishvara
(god) in their system, so they left it out.

Samkhya dominated Hindu philosophy for a good 600 years before starting to decline in the tenth century.

The agnostic Mimamsa school, which also began in ancient times, was still going strong in the Middle Ages. Like Samkhya, this school believed in an unseen spirit realm but had no positions available for actual gods. Instead, the spirit of the universe was fueled by
karma,
the acts of human beings.

Calling out “foolish men” — Jinasena

By the ninth century, the atheistic Jain religion had been going strong for 1,500 years, and a Jain teacher named Jinasena wrote
Mahapurana,
an important Jain text that remains to this day one of the most complete descriptions of Jain tradition and belief. And smack in the middle is one of the boldest defenses of atheism ever written.

“Some foolish men declare that Creator made the world,” said Jinasena. “The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If god created the world, where was he before creation? . . . How can an immaterial god create that which is material? . . . If god created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else, and who will believe this silly stuff?”

He went on at some length, anticipating many ideas of the Enlightenment a good 900 years before that period’s opening bell: “If he created out of love for living things . . . why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune? Thus the doctrine that the world was created by god makes no sense at all.”

Sweeping Out the Superstitions in China

China has a funny habit of turning atheists into gods. Atheist philosophy in China during the medieval period was dedicated in part to restoring these figures to the status of important, but human, teachers:

Gautama Buddha:
He warned that supernatural beliefs — including the idea of gods — can create a serious obstacle to achieving
nirvana,
the total freedom from suffering. His followers were so impressed with his renunciation of gods that within a few generations they venerated him as a god. (Sigh.)

Laozi:
The philosopher Laozi founded Taoism around the same time that Buddhism and Confucianism started — the sixth century BCE, that stunning period I describe in
Chapter 4
. Laozi denied that any conception of a deity can be valid and warned against superstition — then upon his death, his followers revered him as a manifestation of the deity Daode Tianzun, the Grand Pure One. (Double sigh.)

Confucius:
Though deeply revered, Confucius has mostly managed to avoid being turned into a god. But that didn’t prevent his practical, secular philosophy from gathering plenty of supernatural and superstitious elements, like burrs on its trousers, as it hiked forward into the Middle Ages.