LÍNEAS DE DESEO DE LOS ESPACIOS FUNDAMENTALES DE LA INVERSIÓN

Although the Greeks planted the seeds of atheist thought in the West in the fifth century BCE, atheism all but disappeared in Europe during the Middle Ages due to the increasing dominance of Christianity. In the Near East, there were a few Muslim philosophers, such as Ibn al-Rawandi (827-911), whose criticism and skepticism of religion were considered atheistic by his contemporaries but even in such cases, it never amounted to any kind of movement or major stream of thought. It was not until the eighteenth century Enlightenment in Europe that atheism started to become relatively common in intellectual circles and this was most certainly due to the shift towards modernity that occurred in the previous two centuries.

According to Hyman (2007), atheism and modernity are “inextricably linked” (p. 28), with atheism being an inescapable “feature or symptom” of modernity (p. 27). Therefore, one must start with the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), in order to understand the roots of modern atheism. Prior to Descartes, Western philosophy was dominated by the Scholasticism of St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) which emphasized the importance of divine revelation, as understood by church tradition, as the foundation for truth. But with the Protestant Reformation questioning the validity of church tradition, there was a need for new epistemological foundations that could be used by Protestants and Catholics alike (Hyman, 2007, p. 34). Descartes sought to establish these new foundations by questioning everything, even his own existence, and then starting from scratch using rational arguments alone. It was from this motivation that he developed his famous proposition cogito ergo sum

(“I think therefore I am”). Although this statement was indeed an important one in that it offered a way to escape absolute skepticism, it was his use of logic and reason to get there that was most revolutionary. As Hymen (2010) writes, “For all its gloss of theological orthodoxy, Descartes’s method was marked, above all else, by its quest for

certainty on the basis of reason” (p. 19). This, in essence, is the defining aspect of modernity, which Hyman (2007) summarizes as the “desire for an all-encompassing mastery of reality by rational and/or scientific means” (p. 28). Without knowing it, Descartes had opened the door to new ways of understanding God and the world. He had shifted the starting point for all inquiry from God to the human ability to reason.

Although Descartes held on to a traditional concept of God at the same time as his modern epistemology, other seventeenth century philosophers did not. According to Hecht (2004), “the two great figures of atheism in the seventeenth century were Spinoza and Hobbes – although neither ever described himself as an atheist” (ebook, ch. 8). Due to their unconventional views, both were labelled atheists by their peers. On the one hand, Spinoza was what we would call today a pantheist. He believed that, “God and everything were the same. God’s thought did not make the world, God

is his thought, and the God-thought is the world... God did not have purposes. Nature was self-causing and unfolded according to necessary law. There were no miracles” (Hecht, ebook, ch. 8, italics in original). On the other hand, Hobbes was a strict materialist. According to Hecht, “the truth about religion, as Hobbes explained it, is that it had been formed and sustained by people in power, to control their subjects... he argued against religion, and against any conception of God beyond the simplest statement that God exist, and many were unconvinced that he meant that” (ebook, ch. 8).

In the eighteenth century, we find the first self-described atheist philosopher, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who was one of the chief editors of the French

Encyclopédie. By the time of Diderot, the Enlightenment was at its height and intellectuals throughout Europe were emphasizing science and reason over church tradition and biblical inerrancy. Many contemporaries of Diderot, such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France and the founding fathers Benjamin Franklin,

Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson in America, were deists and were content to simply relegate God to the position of a passive Creator. But Diderot went one step further. His strict rationalism left no room for God at all. According to Hymen (2010), Diderot:

reached his conclusions by further intensifying the insights of Descartes and [Sir Isaac] Newton – the very thinkers upon whom Christians depended as modern defenders of the faith. Descartes was thought to provide a defence of theism using the weapons of modern philosophy, while Newton was thought to do so using those of modern science. Diderot’s contribution in this respect was to show how clearly these weapons could turn out to be double-edged swords (p. 7).

In Diderot’s view, Descartes and Newton had the correct methodology but abandoned it whenever they turned from worldy matters toward theological matters. In contrast, Diderot scrutinized God in the same way that he would anything else and was

eventually unable to believe in God at all.

The Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) was another important figure in eighteenth century atheism, although like Hobbes and Spinoza, he never used the term to describe himself. More of an agnostic, Hume fleshed out what an epistemology based on pure empiricism really looked like. According to Hymen (2010), “he saw that if empiricism were adopted consistently, this would mean reasoning ‘merely from the known phenomena, and [dropping] every arbitrary supposition or conjecture’. The result was that one could have knowledge of nothing that was not derived from sense experience” (p. 32). Because one could not obtain knowledge about God through the five senses, Hume felt that it was thus impossible to have any knowledge about God at all. This was later addressed by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who famously differentiated between how a thing appears to us through our senses and the

inaccessible ding an sich (“thing in itself”) that can still be postulated through reason. Kant felt that the existence of God was one of those things that could not be

postulated through empiricism but could still be postulated through reason. Thus, the influence of Hume’s agnosticism on eighteenth century philosophy was somewhat curbed and it would be many more decades before atheistic views took stronger root within Western philosophy.

The nineteenth century saw atheism move from simply being a minority philosophical position to having a more practical influence on the world stage. Inspired by atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1804-1872) idea that religion teaches us more about humans than it does about God, Karl Marx (1818-1883) famously penned The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and set the stage for the world’s first atheistic form of government. Shortly thereafter, in 1859, the agnostic Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published his On the Origin of Species, which had a profound effect on humanity’s understanding of itself. By the end of the century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was applying his atheistic views to psychology and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had made his famous declaration, “God is dead.” Whether or not Nietzsche actually felt that God did not exist was not the point. The point was that, by the end of the nineteenth century, God no longer seemed relevant.

Of course, when it came to the beliefs of everyday folk, God was certainly still relevant at the beginning of the twentieth century, as is still the case today. However, when it came to philosophical and scientific circles, atheism indeed went from being a minority position to being the majority position somewhere around the turn of the century. Throughout the 1900’s, the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1872- 1970) dominated in English-speaking countries while the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) dominated in mainland Europe. On top of this, a 1914 study by James Leuba showed that about 60% of scientists in America had no belief

in God – a figure that remained steady throughout the twentieth century (Larson & Witham, 1997). But perhaps the most famous American atheist of the twentieth century was neither a philosopher, nor a scientist. Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919- 1995) rose to prominence in the public sphere due to her role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision to no longer allow school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools. That same year she founded the organization American Atheists, which she led until her death. Her role in championing the rights of nonbelievers and in encouraging atheists to band together in more structured ways set the stage for the new atheist movement of today.