Imagine There's No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World

Imagine There’s No Heaven

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To Esther, Bernie, Lil, Beth, Walter, Anne, Artie, Lauren, Seth and Noah

Come no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn and get and have and climb. . . . Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson¹

Contents

Prologue: Everything Must Be Examined

1: How Can That Be?

Why Disbelief

2: A Clear Understanding of What Happened

Disbelief and Learning Arrive Together in Greece

3: They Forbid Rational Speculation

Disbelief and Learning Decline Together in

Christian Europe

4: Nothing but This Visible World

Europe’s Return to Reason

5: How Heaven Goes

Disbelief and Science in the Seventeenth Century

6: Open Your Eyes

The Beginnings of the Enlightenment

7: Bombs on the House of the Lord

The Enlightenment Argument for Atheism

8: The Beast Let Loose

Revolution in America and France

9: This Glorious Land of Freedom

Abolition, Suffrage and Freethinking

10: Free Rovers on the Broad, Bright, Breezy Common of the Universe

Working-Class Atheism in Nineteenth-Century

Britain

11: To Wipe Away the Entire Horizon

Creating the Twentieth Century

12: The Passions of This Earth

Living Without Gods

13: The Gods Are Being Driven from the Earth

Secularism in Europe and America

14: This Breach of Naïveté

Religion Unregarded

Epilogue: Above Us Only Sky

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Everything Must Be Examined

A revolution is always accomplished against the gods.

—Albert Camus¹

Denis Diderot first came to Paris as a teenager in 1728 to continue the education he had begun with the Jesuits. He was an enthusiastic student, even deciding at one point to become a Jesuit. But Diderot soon learned that another kind of education was available in Paris in the eighteenth century. Evenings spent in conversation with the city’s impoverished bohemians and budding intellectuals eventually cost the young man his faith in the church, the Jesuits and then in Christ. His father ordered him to leave Paris. Diderot stayed. He had a new aspiration: to become a philosopher.

Diderot married a woman who desired fidelity. He found a mistress who desired money—in shorter supply among his crowd even than fidelity. This, along with the birth of two children, encouraged Diderot’s transition from mere café habitué to published author.

His early efforts included a translation of a history of Greece, an erotic novel and a project that would prove noteworthy: Diderot signed on to help with the translation into French of an Englishman’s Cyclopoedia, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Science.² He was also writing philosophy—increasingly controversial, clandestinely published philosophy. For, after some more years of impassioned discussion, reading and writing, Denis Diderot no longer believed in any sort of god.

In recounting the history of atheism, this book will have many such tales to tell. Yes, it is true that in just about all human societies at just about all times most believed that the universe is governed by a supernatural Being (or beings). However, many individuals in many societies at many times surrendered, as did Diderot, that belief. The names of some of them are familiar: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Salman Rushdie and even the Marquis de Sade. Others who chose to live without religion—Ernestine Rose and Charles Bradlaugh are examples—should be better known, given their historical import and former notoriety.

Most societies at most times scorned those who denied their God (or gods), so atheists sometimes suffered persecution, displayed courage, led lives of struggle. The book in which Diderot worked out his argument against the existence of God, Letter on the Blind, was published under a pseudonym, but the authorities connected it to him. Diderot’s punishment was three months in the Vincennes prison—one of them in its dungeon.³

However, despite the fact that they often had to hide their ideas or publish clandestinely, despite the fact that they sometimes were thrown in prison, nonbelievers such as Diderot helped lead the way to the modern world. Indeed, the struggles of those who challenged the supernatural and insisted that we concern ourselves instead with the natural contributed, I will argue, to what may be humankind’s greatest accomplishments: the advancement of knowledge and the expansion of human rights. Subtracting overbearing gods from the heavens encouraged the growth of learning and liberty on earth.

This book focuses mostly, but not entirely, on the West. It ends in the twenty-first century with religion showing signs of weakening even in that hotbed of belief, the United States. It starts in Greece in Thucydides’ time, when myths receded and history, science and philosophy began racing ahead.

Enlightenment Paris was another place where the value for new thinking of turning away from old gods was particularly apparent. The attacks on religion that energized cafés, salons and underground bookstalls inspired challenges to church-supported prejudices and tyrannies. Atheism in eighteenth-century France promoted egalitarianism. Discouraging reliance upon church authority also encouraged the era’s voracious pursuit of secular knowledge—exhibited in the Enlightenment’s great work: the thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie.

Indeed, rarely have the contributions of atheism to the creation of the modern world been as apparent as in the person of Denis Diderot. His parish priest dubbed this unflinching, if mostly clandestine, critic of religion a monster of impiety.⁴ He was also a monster of liberty: an unflinching, if mostly clandestine, critic of the old, despotic political system, an opponent of colonialism as well as slavery. And Diderot, sometimes known in Paris as The Philosopher (an honorific previously reserved for Aristotle),⁵ was the main editor of the Encyclopédie.

He had substituted for the small Cyclopoedia, which he was supposed to be translating, an original work: a huge compendium—71,818 articles in total—of current human (or at least European) knowledge, in alphabetical order. The authors of those articles included many of the major thinkers of the day. Diderot and other nonbelievers made the editorial decisions. Faith had its testaments. The Encyclopédie stood, with Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, as probably the greatest testament to reason and secular understandings since Aristotle.

Everything must be examined, is how Diderot explained the guiding principle of the Encyclopédie, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.⁶ Everything in eighteenth-century Europe usually meant two things: the church and the monarchy.⁷ Religion as well as government, the point was, could not be immune to honest, searching examination if social, political and intellectual progress was to continue. The critique of religion in the Encyclopédie was in fact circumspect, but it was apparent to those familiar with the arguments.

Religion retreats to the extent that philosophy advances, Diderot had concluded as he was losing his belief in even the wispiest of gods.⁸ But this book will argue that the retreat of religion is not just a result of intellectual progress; it is a crucial cause of that and other kinds of progress. When ancient ways and ancient texts are no longer held sacrosanct, some comfort or confidence may be lost, but when everything is examined, much can be improved. The escape from fairy stories and dogma has opened minds.

The contributions of religion have been manifold and important—in individual lives but also to art and, at times, to morality. However, our world was born, too, of this struggle against religion—long before and well after, not just during, the Enlightenment.

Tens of thousands of histories have been written of various beliefs in various gods. This book is something different: an account of the development and power of the idea that we live without gods (or God)—a history of atheism and all that it has accomplished.

1

How Can That Be?

Why Disbelief

Lost in an immense forest during the night I only have a small light to guide me. An unknown man appears and says to me: My friend, blow out your candle so you can better find your way. This unknown man is a theologian.

—Denis Diderot¹

Who is history’s first known atheist?

In 415 BCE a bronze tablet was placed on the Acropolis in Athens offering a sum of money to anyone who brought Diagoras of Melos back alive for trial and half as much money to anyone who killed him. The evidence is strong that Diagoras had been accused of impiety: scoffing at and exposing the mysteries of a local religious rite. It is less clear that this was the same Diagoras who had achieved renown as a poet and was said to have abandoned belief in the gods after someone stole and had a success with one of his poems.²

Atheists appeared early in Greece. The word is of Greek origin. (Atheos meant, originally, ungodly, though it came to mean without gods or denier of gods.³) But India offers at least one name that might compete with that of Diagoras for the title first-known atheist—depending on how we read hazy accounts and interpret hazy dates.⁴

Ajita Kesakambali is one of the participants in a Buddhist dialogue, the Sçmaññphala Sutta in which a king interrogates leaders of major sects about the value of the religious life of renunciation.⁵ The Buddha, not surprisingly, goes last and wins over the king. Ajita’s earlier response is, however, more surprising: he tells the king that there is, in fact, no value whatsoever in the religious life. It is an empty lie, mere idle talk, when men say there is profit therein, he insists. Ajita sees no merit in alms, sacrifices or offerings. In his view there is neither fruit nor result of good or evil deeds. He rejects, too, the notion that there are beings springing into life without mother or father. Ajita denies that some enlightened beings have somehow understood . . . both this world and the next. He denies the existence of a world that might be called the next. Fools and wise alike, Ajita concludes, on the dissolution of the body, are cut off, annihilated, and after death they are not.

That is a forceful dismissal of religion by the standards of just about any era, even Diderot’s. This dialogue was written down long after the time of the Buddha, if there was a Buddha. It might have taken place, if it did take place, in the fifth or fourth century BCE—possibly before, probably after Diagoras. (Dates in India are hard to establish before Alexander’s invasion in 327 BCE.⁶) And we hear no other tales about Ajita—if he was a real, not mythical, character. However, it is clear that such ideas were in the air in India. For the country did have a long-lived sect of nonbelievers, the Cārvāka, and there is evidence that they date back to about this time.

The texts in which the Cārvāka’s views are said to have been recorded have not survived.⁷ That is a common problem in the history of atheism. Important writings questioning religion were always vulnerable to elision or destruction during periods of intolerance. To learn what the Cārvāka thought, it is necessary to rely—not for the last time in this book—upon generally hostile sources and, for fuller accounts of the philosophy of the Cārvāka, upon much later sources. (Jennifer Michael Hecht’s work acquainted me with writings on the Cārvāka—and much else.)

Nevertheless, it is possible to establish that the Cārvāka entirely rejected the supernatural. Only the perceived exists, they insist, according to an explanation of their philosophy from the ninth century of the Common Era.⁸ High on the list of entities in which the Cārvāka did not believe, because such beings could not be perceived, were gods.

This literal atheism was not that unusual or shocking in ancient India. Various forms of Buddhism or Jainism underplay or ignore gods. But the Cārvāka also reject rebirth, enlightenment, nirvana and karma (that satisfying, you-get-what-you-deserve link between behavior and destiny). Uncivilized ignorant fools, they proclaim, according to one much later account, . . . imagine that spirit is something different from body and reaps the reward of actions in a future state; we might as well expect to find excellent fruit drip from trees growing in the air.⁹

A good summary of the credo of this Indian sect survives from the ninth century¹⁰:

A person is happy or miserable through [the laws] of nature; there is no other cause.

Who paints the peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There exists here no cause excepting nature.

The soul is but the body characterized by the attributes signified in the expressions, I am stout, I am youthful, I am grown up, I am old, etc. It is not something other than that. . . .

There is no world other than this; there is no heaven and no hell.

The Cārvāka are not the only answer to the argument that atheism is a phenomenon limited to the West, or that other, earlier societies did not have the requisite understanding of the natural to dismiss the supernatural or that their societies were insufficiently liberal or pluralistic to tolerate atheism. They are not the only answer to the argument that atheism is a product of modernity, the Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolution.¹¹ But the Cārvāka, whose views seem compatible with those of twenty-first-century atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, may be the best answer to these arguments.

And they also demonstrate that a view of the world based on disbelief in the supernatural can have staying power, as they appear to have been around in India in one form or another for a couple of millennia.

One of this chapter’s purposes is to demonstrate that disbelief in gods has not been that uncommon. Another of its purposes is to explain why.

Atheism in one person or culture is not identical to atheism in another. Just as we have varieties of religions, we have varieties of disbelief (though they tend not to be so mutually intolerant). With the help of philosophy and science, atheism has strengthened and deepened in recent centuries. But atheism did not originate in recent centuries. The Cārvāka were remarkable, but they were not alone. Where it is possible to look, outspoken nonbelievers* frequently turn up.

Indeed, a kind of unbelief also appears even where it is not possible to look directly: in societies that left no written record, in preliterate societies. Here, in trying to understand preliterate disbelief, we are dependent on the anthropological record: on Westerners who encountered these cultures in the last few centuries.

An account survives, for example, of a native of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific, early in the nineteenth century, whose unbelief had gone pretty far. That account comes from a British teenager, William Mariner, who was stranded on the islands when the natives captured his ship, and whose adventures and observations were later recounted in a book.¹² The preliterate native of those islands with that skeptical perspective on religion was their king, Finow. Finow had often stated to Mr. Mariner, the book reports, his doubts that there were such beings as the gods. He thought that men were fools to believe what the priests told them.¹³

Finow lived more than 2,000 years after that Greek nonbeliever, Diagoras. But his story—available to us only because he was visited by some Europeans—is a clue that in the tens of thousands of years before recorded history there likely were plenty of others who doubted there were such beings as the gods.

And Finow is far from the only preliterate nonbeliever in the anthropological literature. Among the !Kung Bushmen in southern Africa in the 1920s, some men believed that lions harbor the spirits of powerful dead Bushmen. But, according to the anthropologist Viktor Lebzelter, other members of the same tribe chuckled at the idea. That’s just a tale, they said.¹⁴ Another anthropologist, A. B. Ellis, describes the various reactions in a crowd at an initiation ceremony for some new Ashanti priests in West Africa in the nineteenth century. The old people, particularly the old women, he explains, demonstrated the most implicit faith. But many of the younger people appeared skeptical, and some openly laughed.¹⁵

These were less carefully worked out and probably less sweeping forms of disbelief than that of the Cārvāka: in a preliterate society, less energy may be devoted to coming up with coherent and consistent philosophies.¹⁶ But even individuals in preliterate societies can marshal a pervasive and compelling doubt.

Anti-religious sentiments are difficult to measure in a society. They are often halting, inchoate or confused. And such sentiments are frequently submerged, since their expression can prove embarrassing or even dangerous. Preliterate religions, like postliterate religions, can make life unpleasant for those who question their practices—and therefore their power. King Finow on the Tonga Islands was not unwise enough to express his doubts in public, but word that Finow was disrespectful to the gods got around. He died suddenly—probably poisoned by a priest.¹⁷

No animals demonstrate evidence of religion. All human societies that have been studied by anthropologists do. Preliterate societies may have their Finows, their doubters, but there is no evidence that there has ever been a whole tribe of doubters or nonbelievers.¹⁸ (Despite the best efforts of the Soviets, the modern world, too, has yet to achieve such a society, though some arrondissements in Paris may come close.)

Why? If religion is defined as a shared belief in supernatural beings (or a supernatural Being),¹⁹ why do all human societies, beginning with preliterate societies, feature such beliefs, especially since hard and fast evidence of the existence of such beings has been conspicuous in its absence?

The answer is probably not primarily because religion provided comfort to our ancestors. When your existence is painful, it might be cheering to imagine the possibility of another, less painful existence. No doubt it is reassuring to think that you and those you hold dear don’t really, finally, absolutely cease existing. It must be a comfort for those !Kung Bushmen who did believe to imagine some of their heroes carrying on as lions. It must be a comfort to think that they themselves might stick around that way, too. The role of religion in taking some of the sting out of death should not be underestimated.

But it shouldn’t be overestimated either. Many preliterate societies are not just looking for some way to comfort the bereaved; they are concerned with making sure all those potentially cranky dead people—and they do add up—don’t hang around and cause trouble.²⁰ The presence of the recently dead is far more likely to be dangerous than reassuring, explains the anthropologist Pascal Boyer.²¹

Gods, too, can be troublemakers in preliterate societies. They are sometimes called upon, sometimes fended off. Indeed, it is not clear that the manipulative, demanding, jealous, deceptive and often amoral spirits and gods most preliterate societies have attempted to engage offer much comfort.²²

Nor, according to Boyer, do societies have religion primarily because of some deep human need to explain where we come from, why we die or why there is suffering in the world. For one thing, most religions among preliterate peoples do not much concern themselves with such sweeping, unwieldy questions. They may have something to say about why this particular person died at this particular time. But even on such smaller questions the answers can be unhelpfully baroque—some complex tale about the behavior of quirky, headstrong supernaturals.²³ Contemporary religions may do better with consolation, metaphysics and ethics, but most of them, too, trace their ancestry, if you go back far enough, not to a philosophical mission but to the cult of a stubborn, praise-loving supernatural.

Religions can, no doubt, encourage and preserve some useful behaviors—burying the dead, avoiding potentially diseased pork, resting one day a week, refraining from killing your neighbor. But religions also support many behaviors that not only do not contribute to the survival of their members and their genes, but are potentially harmful—fasting, staying celibate or picking fights with infidels, for example. Usefulness is only a small part of the answer.

Instead, to understand religion it is worth considering a study of one of the species of nonbelievers with which we share the planet: pigeons. In 1948, the experimental psychologist B. F. Skinner put hungry pigeons in a cage into which food appeared every fifteen seconds. The behavior of the pigeons had absolutely no effect on whether or when the food arrived, but in most cases the birds convinced themselves that it did. Soon most of the pigeons began repeating dances—dances that, Skinner believed, had become associated in their minds with the coming of the food.²⁴

Skinner titled his article on the subject, ‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon (though the pigeons presumably had no sense of the supernatural). The behavior of these birds in their attempts to spur the arrival of food—turning counterclockwise a few times, for example—seems awfully foolish; just as some may find it foolish for a basketball player to cross himself before taking a foul shot. But, the point is, pigeons disposed to finding connections between their behaviors and eating are, as a rule, more likely to survive than more reserved and less easily convinced (less superstitious?) birds.²⁵

Similarly, humans disposed to find a connection between a prayer to a god and success in war are more likely to spot a connection between watering holes and the presence of animals, between certain bushes and sweet berries or between surrounding and capturing.²⁶ Evolutionarily successful animals with and without feathers, in other words, possess an excess of this itch to make connections, and the same mental muscle that works out natural connections also fashions supernatural connections.²⁷ We are prepared to consider both planting a seed and making a sacrifice as causes in these incessant efforts to gain some control over effects. Whole societies might, like those pigeons, end up believing the most unreasonable sounding things, they may cling to these beliefs in the face of a surfeit of contradictory evidence, but somewhere back in the prehistory of a belief is usually a pragmatic impulse to operate effectively in the world.

Those who have been pondering this subject have suggested that other useful mental muscles are also involved in the production of belief. (I am depending here on the work of Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer and Daniel C. Dennett.²⁸) Our nervous systems are, they note, hypersensitive to the presence of hidden threats. Those humans who ran because they thought they saw a hostile face in that bush—even if nine out of ten times they were wrong—were more likely to survive and pass on their genes than their more sanguine or oblivious neighbors. And a byproduct of a hypersensitivity to faces in bushes is a tendency to see gods in clouds.

Add to that exaggerated alertness to threats an exaggerated alertness to the presence of other minds. It is important for our survival that we realize that behind that face is a conscious being just like us—with needs, irritations and purposes; capable of loving but also of plotting and deceiving.²⁹ It is so important that we tend to overdo it and see conscious beings, just like us, in the stars, in the dead or determining our fate. Thus the moon demands its share of the food. Thus our ancestors protect us. Thus everything happens for a reason.

Our minds were also selected for their ability to focus on the extraordinary, the counterintuitive: the fact that the sky has suddenly darkened, the fact that the baby has suddenly stopped crying, the fact that our mate did not return before bedtime. And nothing is as extraordinary and counterintuitive as super-powerful, immortal beings. Such characters grab attention. Such characters stick in the mind. We have a weakness for the fabulous.

Religion, as those who study its causes like to point out, has high costs: gods must be propitiated, animals sacrificed, temple fees paid, religious wars fought. Yet, early hominids with a propensity toward belief in the supernatural probably had certain advantages—because such beliefs occasionally enforce valuable behaviors but, more important, because such beliefs are unintended consequences of ways of thinking that are eminently valuable. An analogy—an unsympathetic one—could be made to an interest in pornography as an unintended consequence of our impulse to procreate. According to this compelling recent research, belief is, to employ Boyer’s term, a side effect of extremely useful, genetically programmed habits of mind.³⁰

But our genes also encourage questioning.

Compelling as it may be, the world of spirits has not really been humankind’s home. The majority of men live in it only at moments, explains the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Farmers may check the omens before planting but will likely devote much more energy to weeding and watering after planting. Basketball players may spend a few seconds crossing themselves before a foul shot, but they likely will have spent many hours in the gym practicing foul shots. The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts . . . is the paramount reality in human experience, Geertz states.³¹

To live successfully in the common-sense, practical, everyday world we have to test the connections we spot and sharpen the theories we formulate. This is the third time I’ve come to this watering hole, and I’ve yet to see any animals. We have to be alert to inconvenient facts. We have to be concerned with what is true. We are, consequently, disposed to probe, even to doubt: Does this bush really produce good berries? To survive it helps to question.

Disbelief tends to come upon us for three reasons and appear to us in three corresponding varieties. They are all very old, so discussing them—in this chapter and the next—also provides an opportunity to complete a quick sketch of the early history of atheism. They are all seductive and help, consequently, to explain why disbelief has proven, as this book will demonstrate, so resilient, even common. And they are all potent. They encourage certain views of the world—rather modern views. So there is support here for my argument that atheism has helped form our view of the world. The first of these explanations for disbelief is this basic human compulsion to question.

Did the shaman succeed in curing that sick woman? Did the rainmaker manage to make it rain? Wasn’t that witch doctor, who had seemed to draw a red substance out of a patient’s body, recently spotted in a garden where flowers of exactly that color grew?³² Questioning—doubt—is where atheism begins. Why have I never encountered any of those spirits? How can they survive without bodies? Where are those other worlds? How can a being exist, as the Cārvāka asked, that is capable of painting peacocks and teaching cuckoos to sing? How can there be gods, as Diagoras may have asked, who would allow someone to get away with stealing someone else’s poem?

If the urge to make connections can push us toward the supernatural, the urge to question those connections can pull us back. And humans—with the benefit of language—are in a better position to formulate such questions than, say, pigeons: Are dead Bushmen really somehow inside of lions?

In a culture permeated by belief, such stimulants to disbelief, however, work slowly. B. F. Skinner succeeded in extinguishing the superstitious response to the regular arrival of food he had been able to produce in one hungry pigeon. He simply stopped supplying the food. Eventually the pigeon stopped doing the dance it associated with the food. The absence of food became, in other words, the inconvenient fact that undercut the pigeon’s sense (if we can use such a word) of the efficacy of its dance. However, before this behavior faded the hungry pigeon repeated it—futilely—another 10,000 (!) times.³³

One question is particularly important to the slow process of surrendering belief—a skeptical, often rhetorical question: how can that be? This question was enunciated—for instance, my favorite instance—during a debate on the validity of religion in Africa in the 1860s.³⁴ Arguing the affirmative was an upper-class, religious Englishman, Samuel White Baker, who was on his way to discovering one of the sources of the Nile. Arguing against religion, or at least Baker’s version of religion, was a man he encountered along the way—a man Baker describes as a wild, naked savage. His name was Commoro, and he was a chief of the Latooka tribe in East Africa. They communicated through interpreters:

Baker:

Have you no belief in a future existence after death? . . .

Commoro:

Existence after death! How can that be? Can a dead man get out of his grave, unless we dig him out?

Baker:

Do you think man is like a beast that dies and is ended?

Commoro:

Certainly. . . .

When mulling over this debate between Baker and Commoro—or the millions of similar debates engaged in by believers and nonbelievers in other times or places—it is probably wise to keep in mind this observation about our species: humans are odd mixtures of credulity and incredulity. There are limits to what we are willing to swallow. Some of us—like Commoro—aren’t prepared to accept all that much on faith.

The question we consequently ask, often just to ourselves—how can that be?—makes a negative but important contribution to learning. For it is impossible to figure out what does make sense without determining what doesn’t. Commoro’s question would prove crucial, therefore, to the development of such fields of knowledge as logic and science. If all living creatures die and humans are living creatures, then how can it be that we live forever? Or, if the sun gives off heat, how can it be that it traverses the sky on a god’s chariot?

The Greeks, who made great contributions in logic and science, had a name for this kind of thinking: skepticism. Their skepticism, which they took far, wasn’t always aimed at religion. Indeed, skeptics have also been known to criticize what they consider to be the smugness of atheists. But skepticism often leads to a variety of disbelief in the supernatural—a logic-based, take-nothing-for-granted critique of religion. How can it be, asked the great Greek Skeptic Carneades, that perfect beings can possess virtues? Could an invulnerable god, for example, display courage? Don’t our virtues depend upon our very human flaws?³⁵

Skepticism, as a school of philosophy (deserving of a capital S), flourished for a time in Greece and Rome.³⁶ It was rediscovered in Europe in the sixteenth century and, in less formal versions, has continued to undercut certainties and hone understandings to this day. But it was not beyond the capabilities of many, many other humans living in many, many different times and places—including a preliterate, Latooka chief.

The dialogue between Samuel White Baker and Commoro, as reported by Baker, continued:

Baker:

Then you believe in nothing; neither in a good nor evil spirit! And you believe that when you die it will be the end of body and spirit; that you are like other animals; and that there is no distinction between man and beast; both disappear, and end at death?

Commoro:

Of course they do.

Baker, struggling to fend off this redoubtable doubt, hazarded an analogy: Some corn had been taken out of a sack for the horses, Baker writes, and a few grains lying scattered on the ground, I tried the beautiful metaphor of St. Paul as an example of a future state. Making a small hole with my finger in the ground, I placed a grain within it: ‘That,’ I said, ‘represents you when you die.’ Covering it with earth, I continued, ‘That grain will decay, but from it will rise the plant that will produce a reappearance of the original form.’

Commoro:

"Exactly so; that I understand. But the original grain does not rise again; it rots like the dead man, and is ended; the fruit produced is not the same grain that we buried, but the production of that grain: so it is with man—I die, and decay, and am ended; but my children grow up like the fruit of the grain."

Baker’s response? Having judged the religious argument . . . a failure, he writes, I was obliged to change the subject of conversation.³⁷

Writing was invented in Sumeria around 3500 BCE. By the end of that millennium it had been adopted in Egypt. But many centuries passed before this new invention was employed in recording tales or spells. The Pyramid Texts—a collection of hieroglyphic spells found on the walls of ten Egyptian pyramids in Saqqara—qualify, therefore, as among the oldest surviving religious texts. They likely date from between about 2350 and 2100 BCE.³⁸

And then—in the early centuries of descriptive writing and, therefore, of recorded history—what may stand as the oldest surviving evidence of disbelief arrives. For these ancient Egyptian writings on religion are followed remarkably quickly (given these timescales) by an ancient Egyptian text that, despite occasional references to gods, is suspicious of religion. It is a papyrus copy of a song said to have been inscribed on the tomb of a pharaoh, Intef, who died in 2118 BCE.

Both the Pyramid Texts and that Egyptian song are haunted by death. In the case of those religious spells etched on pyramid walls, the focus is on what awaits the pharaoh after his death. We learn that his face will be as that of falcons, that his wings will be as those of birds. (Amalgams of humans and animals are de rigueur in early belief systems.) We learn that the pharaoh will, thus, be flown . . . to the sky. The Pyramid Texts note that certain behaviors have been or will be required of the pharaoh to ensure the journey’s success, including making offerings to the various deities and purifying himself in the Marsh of Reeds. But the pharaoh’s reward, the texts make clear, will be substantial: Your bones will not perish; your flesh will not pass away . . . for you are one of the gods. And this reward will endure, these texts proclaim, for eternity.³⁹

That Egyptian song, on the other hand, is devoid of speculation about an afterlife. The dead are gone for good: One generation passes, another stays behind. That’s all we know:

There is no return for them

To explain their present state of being.⁴⁰

So what is the song’s suggested response to the inevitability of death? It has to do with life:

So spend your days joyfully

And do not be weary with living!

No man takes his things with him,

And none who go can come back again.

After the urge to question and ask how can that be?, this sense that we ought to find what joys we can in this world—not in some sort of magical afterlife—is the second major spur to atheism. And it leads to a second ancient variety of disbelief: a commitment to our mortal lives—freely and exuberantly lived. Over the millennia the dream of gods and their eternal kingdoms of the sky has often dissipated as we commit ourselves to the pleasures, however ephemeral, of the earth.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, humankind’s oldest surviving epic, is also much concerned with death.⁴¹ In fact, Gilgamesh is overwhelmed by an encounter with it. After his best friend succumbs to the curse of a goddess, the hero moans like a woman mourning; he rages like a . . . lioness robbed of her whelps (becoming, in his grief, female); he tears out his hair; he cries for seven days and nights—refusing to let his friend be buried until the body begins to rot.⁴² And losing someone you love is only half the problem. Gilgamesh soon confronts the other half: What my brother is now, he realizes, that shall I be when I am dead. This awareness of his own mortality overwhelms the hero. How can I rest, how can I be at peace? he asks. Despair is in my heart. Gilgamesh is badly in need of the comfort of an afterlife. He will not find it.

The poems that make up The Epic of Gilgamesh (most of the poems originally written in Sumerian) were etched, in cuneiform, on clay tablets in the first centuries of the second millennium BCE, a few centuries after the Egyptian song (though the Gilgamesh poems, like many of these early writings, likely were transcriptions of older oral works).⁴³ Gilgamesh ends up spending the rest of the epic searching for the sort of pathway to immortality outlined in the Pyramid Texts—in vain. The poems do not hold out the hope that there is life for humans beyond death. Instead, this epic seems to settle on a response to death close to that of the Egyptian song.

That message is imparted by, among others, a young woman—a maker of wine named Siduri: Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? she asks.⁴⁴ You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. Then Siduri presents her own, quite appealing version of that spend-your-days-joyfully exhortation—a second ancient version:

As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this, too, is the lot of man.

With writing we can listen in for the first time on the religious and philosophical speculations of our ancestors. On the always-insistent subject of death we hear, of course, much testimony, beginning with the Pyramid Texts, about far-away heavens and blissful eternities. But other voices are audible, saying, as Siduri did, that since death is coming, we had best be merry—here, now!

A poem quoted in some ninth century CE writings in support of the Cārvāka position makes a similar suggestion:

While life is yours, live joyously;

None can escape Death’s searching eye.⁴⁵

This philosophy—this simple and often anti-religious philosophy—has gained a name: anacreontic.

Anacreon was a Greek poet, born around 570 BCE and known for the enthusiasm with which he tried to live joyously. Many of his poems, sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, recount his efforts (often unsuccessful) to seduce much younger lovers (male and female) and his concomitant efforts (often successful) to achieve a pleasant level of intoxication.⁴⁶

On honey-cake I first did dine,

Broke off a little piece,

And then I drank a jar of wine,

And then my harp did seize.

Now with its strains I serenade

My lovely friend, the pretty maid.⁴⁷

Anacreon’s name became associated with ardent efforts to enjoy life—so indelibly associated with them that, for example, an eighteenth-century London gentlemen’s club would be named the Anacreontic Society and the theme song its members composed would be called the Anacreontic Song. (Francis Scott Key borrowed its tune for the Star Spangled Banner.) It was a drinking song—a paean to the partnership of wine and love.

Atheism is often viewed as barren and negative, but with this anacreontic spend your days joyfully philosophy arrives a positive view of what life might be free of the supernatural—positive because it is joyful, positive because it extols the pleasures of life here on earth, positive because it sees the inevitability of death making those pleasures still more precious.

This variety of disbelief—disbelief in the afterlife, at least—is well summed up in two (Latin) words: carpe diem, usually translated as pluck [or seize] the day. They are from an ode by the Roman poet Horace, who lived from the time of Julius Caesar to that of Jesus. Horace’s poem is haunted by the notion that life is brief: "Even while we speak, envious time has passed: Carpe diem, putting as little trust as possible in tomorrow!"⁴⁸ James Thrower, whose work on early manifestations of disbelief has helped orient my own, suggests that carpe diem is the first and most subversive challenge to religion.⁴⁹ Perhaps not the first, I must note, but ancient, pervasive and as subversive as any.

The anacreontic philosophy appears in one additional and unexpected place in the ancient world: the Hebrew Bible. No movement rejected as many gods as Jewish monotheism—a product mostly, scholars now believe, of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE in Judea, particularly during the reign of King Josiah.⁵⁰ The one God who survived was stern, praise-loving, upright and, since all the other gods were gone, unmarried. That is why it is surprising to find