Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (21 page)

This idea is nice, and many atheists and agnostics agree with Gould. But others think the idea that science and religion can be separated in this way has several fatal problems. Religion makes factual “what and how” claims all the time, for example, and science has begun to say quite a bit about morality. So in the end, many atheists (and many religious believers as well) feel that Gould’s nice idea solves nothing. (I get into more detail in
Chapter 8
.)

Does this mean you can’t be a religious person and a scientific one? Apparently not, because there are many religious scientists and science-minded religionists alive today. It works in part because many religious expressions in the last century or two have gotten far away from the idea of divine revelation. They see scriptures as a source of inspiration written by other human beings, fallible folks like themselves. After a person gets to that point, reason can be applied to the ideas in scriptures. They can be challenged and even discarded as need be:
Slavery? No thanks. Love your neighbor? Super, let’s keep that one. Six-day creation? Clearly not true — let’s call it a metaphor.
And on it goes.

So yes, science and religion can snuggle comfortably and honestly in the same brain — but only if the methods of gaining knowledge can be brought into reasonable agreement. Some people find that possible, and some don’t.

Part II

Following Atheism through the Ages

Chapter 4

Finding Atheism in the Ancient World

In This Chapter

Deciphering what people in ancient times believed

Hearing echoes of unbelief in unlikely places

Discovering atheism thriving in China and India

Listening for doubt in ancient Greece and Rome

T
hough the history of religious doubt is probably as long as the history of religious belief, doubt leaves fewer footprints. The first evidence of supernatural belief appeared as early as 130,000 years ago in ritualized burials by Neanderthals. But the guy rolling his eyes in the back pew didn’t leave any clues about his opinions.

Unbelief begins to show itself more clearly after prehistory gives way to recorded history, flicking the ears of each and every supernatural belief the human mind creates.

I start by describing how people in modern times have figured out what the ancients believed or didn’t believe — a trickier proposition than you may think. After that, I make a sweeping survey of the ancient world, discovering individual doubters and outright nonbelievers in cultures from Greece to India to China, and even in the shadow of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Uncovering What the Ancients Believed (Or Didn’t)

Finding evidence of religious unbelief in the ancient world isn’t always easy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The challenge is figuring out how to determine what people thousands of years ago believed or questioned.

Disbelief tends to disappear from history for several reasons. Most of what people know today about the past depends on written records passed down hand-to-hand over thousands of years and hundreds of generations. This process isn’t ideal, but it’s the only one available — and religious unbelief is among the least likely ideas to have made it through.

To determine whether disbelief existed thousands of years ago, consider what it takes for an idea to get from an ancient mind to yours today.

1. Someone had to write it down.

Most ideas are already out of the game at this point because most never left the heads of the people who thought them. No matter how brilliant an idea was, if it wasn’t written down, it wasn’t likely to have reached future generations.

2. The written document had to survive, one way or another, for more than 2,000 years.

In order to reach modern times, it must be the case that no person or thing destroyed the document — not just in its own time, but also in every year, decade, and century that followed. Surviving over time is quite a challenge because most documents were on things like papyrus, paper, or parchment. Preserving those documents isn’t easy because the Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere likes to set such things on fire, not to mention a hundred other unhelpful conditions. (Even the original US Declaration of Independence, which after a mere two centuries now lives in a titanium condo full of argon gas, isn’t doing too well.)

So even the things that were lucky enough to be written down in ancient times are now mostly gone. One of the greatest ancient scholars, Didymus of Alexandria, earned the priceless nickname “Bronze Butt” for sitting long enough to write more than 3,000 books — of which zero survived. One literary historian in the fifth century compiled 1,430 quotations from the greatest authors of the ancient world — 1,115 of which are from works that are now lost. And the revolutionary ideas of Democritus, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, survive only in glowing references by other writers.

3. People in every generation naturally tend to preserve and recopy the ideas that they agree with most.

Because religious unbelief has usually been a minority opinion, and a deeply disliked one at that, it’s surprising that
any
hint of ancient atheism found its way to readers today.

On the other hand, sometimes the reviled status of atheism has actually helped pass down the idea. If an idea’s disturbing enough to the mainstream, writers in a given time often spend reams of paper and gallons of ink recording just how wrongheaded it is. In the process, they provide strong indirect evidence that the idea existed in the first place. And because their own writing represents mainstream opinion, it’s carefully preserved and passed on — and the disturbing opinion rides the critic’s coattails down the centuries.

A lot of the evidence I present for ancient atheism in the following sections, though not all, is of this indirect kind.

Leaping Forward: The Axial Age

Something amazing must have been in the water between about 800 and 200 BCE. A number of different world cultures, including China, India, Persia, and Greece, gave rise to whole new ways of thinking about the world. Humanity seemed to take a giant step from a focus on survival to a more conscious, questioning, planful, and searching approach to life.

The period has been called the Axial Age because the world seemed to pivot on a mental axis and continue in a whole new direction. In the span of a few centuries, new philosophies and religions popped up like daisies, including:

Confucianism and Taoism in China

Judaism in Judea

Buddhism and Jainism in India

Several key schools of philosophy in Greece

And kicking and wailing in each and every one of those maternity wards, right alongside these infant faiths and philosophies, was newborn baby atheism.