History of atheism
is the rejection of an assertion that a deity exists. In a narrower sense, positive atheism is specifically the position that there no deities, effectively taking the stance of a positive claim in regards to the existence of any god or goddess. The English term 'atheist' was used at least as early as the sixteenth century and atheistic ideas and their influence have a longer history.
Philosophical atheist thought began to appear in Europe and Asia in the sixth or fifth century BCE. In ancient Greece, playwrights expressed doubt regarding the existence of gods and the antireligious philosophical school Cārvāka arose in ancient India. Materialistic philosophy was produced by the atomists Leucippus and Democritus in 5th century BCE, who explained the world in terms of the movements of atoms moving in infinite space.
The Enlightenment fueled skepticism and secularism against religion in Europe.
Etymology
In early ancient Greek, the adjective meant 'godless'. It was first used as a term of censure roughly meaning 'ungodly' or 'impious'. In the 5th century BCE, the word began to indicate more deliberate and active godlessness in the sense of "severing relations with the gods" or "denying the gods". The term ἀσεβής then came to be applied against those who impiously denied or disrespected the local gods, even if they believed in other gods. Modern translations of classical texts sometimes render as 'atheistic'. As an abstract noun, there was also ἀθεότης, 'atheism'. Cicero transliterated the Greek word into the Latin átheos. The term found frequent use in the debate between early Christians and Hellenists, with each side attributing it, in the pejorative sense, to the other.File:Ephesians 2,12 - Greek atheos.jpg|thumb|left|The Greek word αθεοι, as it appears in the Epistle to the Ephesians 2:12 on the early 3rd-century Papyrus 46. It is usually translated into English as " without God".
The term atheist, in the sense of "one who ... denies the existence of God or gods", predates atheism in English, being first found as early as 1566, and again in 1571. Atheist as a label of practical godlessness was used at least as early as 1577.
The term atheism was derived from the French wikt:athéisme, and appears in English about 1587. An earlier work, from about 1534, used the term atheonism.
Related words emerged later: deist in 1621, theist in 1662, deism in 1675, and theism in 1678. Deism and theism changed meanings slightly around 1700 due to the influence of atheism; deism was originally used as a synonym for today's theism but came to denote a separate philosophical doctrine.
Atheism was first used to describe a self-avowed belief in late 18th-century Europe, specifically denoting disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god. In the 20th century, globalization contributed to the expansion of the term to refer to disbelief in all deities, though it remains common in Western society to describe atheism as "disbelief in God".
Indian philosophy
In the East, a contemplative life not centered on the idea of deities began in the sixth century BCE with the rise of Jainism, Buddhism, and various sects of Hinduism in India, and of Taoism in China. These religions offered a philosophic and salvific path not involving deity worship. Deities are not seen as necessary to the salvific goal of the early Buddhist tradition, and that tradition reflects disbelief in a supreme god or a creator god. Some Buddhist philosophers assert that belief in an eternal creator god is a distraction from the central task of the religious life, and make arguments against it.Within the astika schools of Hindu philosophy, the Samkhya and the early Mimamsa school did not accept a creator-deity in their respective systems.
The principal text of the Samkhya school, the Samkhya Karika, was written by Ishvara Krishna in the fourth century CE, by which time it was already a dominant Hindu school. The origins of the school are much older and are lost in legend. The school was both dualistic and atheistic. They believed in a dual existence of Prakriti and Purusha and had no place for an Ishvara in its system, arguing that the existence of Ishvara cannot be proved and hence cannot be admitted to exist. The school dominated Hindu philosophy in its day, but declined after the tenth century, although commentaries were still being written as late as the sixteenth century.
The foundational text for the Mimamsa school is the Purva Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini. The school reached its height c. 700 CE, and for some time in the Early Middle Ages exerted near-dominant influence on learned Hindu thought. The Mimamsa school saw their primary enquiry was into the nature of dharma based on close interpretation of the Vedas. Its core tenets were ritualism, antiasceticism and antimysticism. The early Mimamsakas believed in an adrishta that is the result of performing karmas and saw no need for an Ishvara in their system. Mimamsa persists in some subschools of Hinduism today.
Cārvāka
The thoroughly materialistic and antireligious philosophical Cārvāka school that originated in India with the Bārhaspatya-sūtras is probably the most explicitly atheist school of philosophy in the region, if not the world. These ancient schools of generic skepticism had started to develop far earlier than the Mauryan period. Already in the sixth century BCE Ajita Kesakambalin was quoted in Pali scriptures by the Buddhists with whom he was debating, teaching that "with the break-up of the body, the wise and the foolish alike are annihilated, destroyed. They do not exist after death."Cārvākan philosophy is now known principally from its Astika and Buddhist opponents. The proper aim of a Cārvākan, according to these sources, was to live a prosperous, happy, productive life in this world. In the book More Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata Ramkrishna Bhattacharya argues that there have been many varieties of materialist thought in India; and that there is no foundation to the accusations of hedonism nor to the claim that these schools reject inference per se as a way of knowledge.
The Tattvopaplavasimha of Jayarashi Bhatta is sometimes cited as a surviving Carvaka text, as Ethan Mills does in Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa. It has been claimed that the school died out sometime around the fifteenth century.
In the oldest of the Upanishads, in chapter 2 of the Brhadāranyaka, the leading theorist Yājnavalkya states in a passage often referred to by the irreligious: "so I say, after death there is no awareness." In the main work by the "father of linguistics", Panini, the main commentary on his affix regarding nastika explains: "an atheist" is one "whose belief is that there is no Hereafter". Cārvāka arguments are also present in the oldest Sanskrit epic, Ramayana, in which the hero Rama is lectured by the sage Javali – who states that the worship of gods is "laid down in the Shastras by clever people, just to rule over other people and make them submissive and disposed to charity."
The Veda philosopher Adi Shankara, who consolidated the non-dualist Advaita Vedanta tradition, spends several pages trying to refute the non-religious schools, as he argues against "Unlearned people, and the Lokayatikas "
According to the historian Dag Herbjørnsrud, the atheist Carvaka schools were present at the court of the Muslim-born Mughal ruler, Akbar, an inquiring skeptic who believed in "the pursuit of reason" over "reliance on tradition". When he invited philosophers and representatives of the different religions to his new "House of Worship" in Fatehpur Sikri, Carvakas were present as well. According to the chronicler Abul Fazl, those discussing religious and existential matters at Akbar's court included the atheists:
Herbjørnsrud argues that the Carvaka schools never disappeared in India, and that the atheist traditions of India influenced Europe from the late 16th century: "The Europeans were surprised by the openness and rational doubts of Akbar and the Indians. In Pierre De Jarric's Histoire, based on the Jesuit reports, the Mughal emperor is actually compared to an atheist himself: “Thus we see in this Prince the common fault of the atheist, who refuses to make reason subservient to faith ”
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski concludes as follows concerning the Jesuit descriptions in her paper “East-West Swerves: Cārvāka Materialism and Akbar's Religious Debates at Fatehpur Sikri” :
The Jesuit Roberto De Nobili wrote in 1613 that the “Logaidas” "hold the view that the elements themselves are god". Some decades later, Heinrich Roth, who studied Sanskrit in Agra ca. 1654–60, translated the Vedantasara by the influential Vedantic commentator Sadananda, a text that depicts four different schools of the Carvaka philosophies. Wojciehowski notes: "Rather than proclaiming a Cārvāka renaissance in Akbar's court, it would be safer to suggest that the ancient school of materialism never really went away."
Buddhism
is sometimes described as nontheistic because of the absence of a creator god, but that can be too simplistic a view. The nonadherence to the notion of a supreme deity or a prime mover is seen by many as a key distinction between Buddhism and other religions. While Buddhist traditions do not deny the existence of supernatural beings, it does not ascribe powers, in the typical Western sense, for creation, salvation or judgement, to the "gods"; however, praying to enlightened deities is sometimes seen as leading to some degree of spiritual merit.Buddhists accept the existence of beings in higher realms, known as devas, but they, like humans, are said to be suffering in samsara, and not particularly wiser than we are. In fact the Buddha is often portrayed as a teacher of the deities, and superior to them.