A question for knowledgeable atheists - and others interested in history

[doctorray]

So, I was asked an interesting question by a student the other day and I'm not entirely satisfied with my answer.  That being the case, I did what any self-respecting 21st-century person does when faced with a knowledge deficit - I have headed to the internet

Comments

[gotham_bound]

Big, big general guess that doesn't help at all: There were cultural, non-believing Jews a long way back. But I only know it from modern Jews. No idea how to make that more concrete.

However very, very specifically: Thomas Moore talked bad about atheists from his Utopia in 15...*mumble*mumble* Ah! Wikipedia says 1516. So they were known back then.

More thoughts (maybe) later.

[essentialsaltes]

It's definitely a tough question, particularly when one has to sort between what was said about X, and what X actually said (or believed). Many of the atheistical Greeks, like Xenophanes, Epicurus, and the Roman Epicurean Lucretius, might be better classed as deists. They recognized some sort of metaphysical god, but denied any divine interaction with the universe. Diagoras may stand out as a good paragon of atheism.

Spinoza was horrified at the thought of being considered an atheist, but his theistic contemporaries were horrified by his pantheistic conception of God... essentially that Nature was God. And thus he was branded an atheist by basically everybody (and his truly devoted enemies would call him an atheist Jew). Parenthetically, Einstein famously declared that he believed in the god of Spinoza.

Naturally, wikipedia covers the subject in some detail, with a bit more emphasis on non-Western possibilities than I can muster

[anonymous]

I think there are a few "milestones" you can point to. According to the OED, the first use of the word in English was in 1587 by Arthur Golding. However, for a long time it was always used in a negative sense. It looks like half the philosophers in Europe after that were at one time or another accused of atheism, but they all denied it. Of course that may be simply because atheism was a crime (sometimes a capital crime) in many places.

Wikipedia claims that "The first open denial of the existence of god and avowal of atheism since classical times may be that of Paul Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) in his 1770 work, The System of Nature."

I'd have to put the biggest milestone at the French Revolution, which seems to be the first time atheism became a "movement".

[doctorray]

Thanks everybody! A bit of research on my own - no, I didn't just sit back and wait for teh intarwubs to spit the answer back at me - does seem to pinpoint Baron d'Holbach as the first writer who might be termed an atheist in the modern, transendence-denying, fully materialist sense of the term. For much of the 16th-18th centuries, 'atheist' seems to have been the word one used mainly as a poorly-defined perjorative, applied to those taking a more rational and emperical approach to understanding the natural world generally. Of course, to a devout Christian, the difference between a deist and an atheist probably seems to be a splitting of hairs...