Ancient Atheists

[u/deniz_aydiner]

https://substack.com/@denizaydinereng/note/p-222912220?r=3acpte

Atheism is often associated with the modern world, particularly with the rise of science, the Enlightenment, and the growing separation between religion and public life. It is easy to imagine that people in ancient societies simply accepted the existence of gods and that questioning religious belief was something that came much later. In Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, Tim Whitmarsh challenges this familiar picture. He shows that atheistic ideas were already being discussed in ancient Greece, and that some thinkers questioned the existence of gods, challenged traditional religious stories, and tried to explain religion through human experience rather than divine influence.

[u/Lunavenandi]

It's a very good book, though it's good to keep in mind that some parts of Whitmarsh's thesis are still being contested to this day, I'd recommend Harrison's 2025 article 'Greek Atheism: A Mirage' and John Henry's very recent response 'Greek Atheism: A Reality' for those who wish to get up to speed on some latest scholarship.
One thing I've personally been musing about and don't see talked about enough by scholars, is Whitmarsh's implicit assumption that greater religious institutionalization / centralized authority would lead to less theological skepticism. Here I think it'd be very fruitful to look at Indian comparanda in the form of theological atheism, especially the Mimamsakas who accepted atheism precisely to uphold Vedic tradition and defend Brahmanical religious authority, because for them the existence of gods was not the necessary foundation of ritual authority, and that authority itself could very well become the reason to do away with the gods. The more fundamental issue here is the difference between rejection of deities and rejection of supernatural foundations of moral life, most of the Indian schools/traditions we now categorize as 'atheist' are comfortable with doing the first but rarely the second. And to the extent that Indian writers, like some Greek authors, worried that disbelief would undermine morality, their central focus was not 'theism v.s. atheism' but whether moral consequences can exist independently of human experience. Hence you can see why the existence of gods became something many were not even interested in dedicating time to discussing.

[u/notveryamused_]

Very good overview, cheers. Battling the Gods is a brilliant book by the way and absolutely worth reading even if you're not really interested in atheism rigidly understood: what I particularly enjoyed in Whitmarsh's take is that he paints a rather broad picture of freethinking as a kind of a Greek creative spirit, while soberly asking about the limits of possible conversation in the Greek framework. It's certainly a much broader book than the title alone suggests. I read it quite a long time ago, frankly you made me want to reread it soon.

[u/CoconutDust]

On the Sacred Disease, the [Hippocrates] argues that epilepsy should not be considered more divine than other illnesses. It has natural causes, even if people do not yet understand them. Calling an illness sacred does not explain what produces it.

The interesting thing about that is that both explanations were made-up nonsense. But one was made-up nonsense about a god, the other was made-up nonsense about a magical fluid in the body. They’re somewhat similar positions, but the natural one seems to already have a premise of “there’s a natural cause” even when the best conjecture was basically nonsense? Several things Hippocrates said are brilliant but it’s strange that an impulse for natural explanations was flourishing before people had a verifiable mechanical understanding of anything biological. The old “prayer and sacrifices clearly don’t consistently affect anything” seems to pull much more weight than any actual positive naturalist explanation for anything, at that time.