Atheism
The belief that refuses to be one
Description
Atheism is, in the strictest sense, simply the absence of belief in a god or gods. Defined that way it is not a position so much as a default — the condition any human enters before being taught otherwise. The interesting question is what happens when that absence becomes self-conscious, when people start defining themselves not just as not-believers but as atheists, with arguments, with traditions of argument, sometimes with movements. At that point atheism stops being merely an empty space and starts to resemble the thing it negates more than its proponents usually like to admit.
Survey data over the past fifty years tells a consistent story across most of the developed world. Religious affiliation has declined steadily, religious practice more steeply, and the fastest-growing category in surveys of belief in the United States and Europe is people who tick none. Whether these people are atheists in any considered sense, or simply unbothered, or vaguely spiritual without institutional attachment, depends on how the question is phrased. Surveys that ask about belief in God find that explicit atheists remain a small minority somewhere between three and ten percent in most Western countries while the larger group is more diffuse.
What makes atheism interesting as a topic is that it has a history of its own. The Western tradition of explicit non-belief runs from ancient materialist philosophers through the medieval freethinkers, the Enlightenment skeptics, the nineteenth-century rationalists, and into the contemporary forms that have emerged since the early 2000s. Each phase has had its own arguments, its own opponents, and its own characteristic mistakes. Tracing the history makes clear that atheism is not the absence of a position but a position with a long pedigree, which is why the New Atheist insistence that it requires no defense is one of its less convincing claims.
The question we're asking: what atheism is, where its arguments come from, and why explicit atheism keeps acquiring the structure of a creed.
What we'll see: the ancient sources, the Enlightenment turn, Nietzsche, and the New Atheist moment.
Table of contents
01Ancient materialism
The earliest sustained tradition of non-religious thinking in the Western canon comes from the Greek and Roman atomists. Democritus, in the fifth century BCE, proposed that everything was made of indivisible particles moving in void, and that the apparent order of the world was a consequence of their interactions rather than the work of any designer. Epicurus, in the fourth and third centuries, took the materialist framework and applied it to ethics, arguing that the gods, if they existed, were unconcerned with human affairs and that the fear of death and divine punishment was the main obstacle to human happiness.
The most accomplished statement of this tradition is Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, written in the first century BCE a six-book Latin poem that lays out a complete materialist picture of the world. Atoms and void account for matter. Natural processes account for weather, disease, and the origins of life. The mind is mortal, the soul dies with the body, and the gods, if they exist, do not intervene. The poem was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 in a German monastery and circulated quietly through the Renaissance, influencing figures from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson, who owned five copies.
02The Enlightenment turn
Explicit atheism, as a publicly defended position in Western thought, is largely an Enlightenment phenomenon. The conditions that made it possible were the wars of religion, which had discredited the authority of any single confession; the scientific revolution, which had produced explanatory frameworks that did not require divine intervention; and the slow construction of a public sphere in which heterodox arguments could circulate without the author being burned. Even with all of this, most early Enlightenment freethinkers were deists rather than atheists they replaced an active personal God with a remote first cause rather than removing God altogether.
The first thinkers willing to argue openly for atheism appeared around the middle of the eighteenth century, mostly in France. Baron d'Holbach, whose System of Nature was published anonymously in 1770, presented a thoroughgoing materialism that explicitly denied the existence of God, the soul, and free will, and argued that religion was the source of most human misery. Diderot was an atheist, although careful about saying so. La Mettrie, with Man a Machine in 1747, argued that the mind was a function of the body. Hume, more cautiously, dismantled the standard arguments for God's existence in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published only after his death in 1779.
03Nietzsche and after
The figure who shifted the conversation most decisively was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work in the 1880s confronted what he took to be the consequences of Enlightenment atheism more honestly than the Enlightenment atheists themselves had. Nietzsche's famous formulation, the death of God, was not a celebration. It was a diagnosis. The God of Christian Europe had become incredible Nietzsche took this as a fact but the moral and existential framework that had been built on top of him remained in place, and would not stand for long without its foundation. The project of the next century, as Nietzsche saw it, was to figure out what came after.
What he predicted was a long crisis. Without God, the inherited values of compassion, equality, the dignity of the weak, and the moral seriousness of historical progress would lose their grounding. People would either fall into nihilism, the conviction that nothing mattered, or invent new values that could function in a post-religious world. Nietzsche's own attempt at the second project the will to power, the superman, the revaluation of all values was idiosyncratic and easily misread, but the diagnosis stuck. The twentieth century, in its various horrors and ideological substitutes for religion, often looked like a confirmation of his analysis.
04The New Atheist moment
The phase that gets the most attention in contemporary discussion is the so-called New Atheism, which emerged in the early 2000s with a series of bestsellers Sam Harris's The End of Faith in 2004, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in 2006, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell in 2006, and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great in 2007. The four authors became known as the four horsemen, and their books shared a common posture religion was not merely false but actively harmful, and reasonable people had a duty to say so.
The political context mattered. The September 11 attacks, the rise of evangelical political power in the Bush years, and conflicts over evolution in American schools had made religion publicly visible in ways that produced a backlash. The New Atheists were positioned as the rationalist response. Their books sold extraordinarily well, their public lectures filled large halls, and for a period in the late 2000s, explicit atheism had a cultural moment in the English-speaking world that it had not had since the nineteenth century.
05Conclusion
Atheism in its bare form is uncontroversial it is just the absence of belief, and most people in most places have managed it about something. What is interesting is the family of explicit positions that organize themselves around that absence, and the difficulty those positions have in remaining merely negative. The materialist tradition from Lucretius onward has had to construct an alternative picture of the world. The Enlightenment atheists had to argue for a politics. Nietzsche had to face the question of what the death of God meant for everything that had been built on his existence. The New Atheists ended up producing a movement, with all the apparatus that movements develop.