The Rise of Atheism

I. Introduction

In this article we will examine the rise and history of atheism. I am well aware that modern atheists will refute the idea that atheism is a religion or cult, but the facts speak to the contrary. Being raised in 20th century America where Christianity was the predominant world-view, one may be excused for being ignorant of atheism as a religion or cult, but those raised in the Soviet Union tell a different story.

Communism is the socialist denomination of atheism, an intense system of carefully designed propaganda to indoctrinate children into atheism. In the early 1920s this system was introduced. Children were ‘octoberists’ from age 7-9, a name taken from the October Revolution. Lenin’s portrait was in every classroom and he was portrayed as the perfect model of atheistic socialism. Octoberists were instilled with social values, but the bottom line was that God does not exist.

From 9-14 one strived to be a ‘pioneer’ with the honor to wear a red scarf as a status symbol. Pioneers had their own songs, and creeds and were utterly indoctrinated with communist ideology in which God had no place, indeed to have a belief in God was considered shameful, traitorous and backward. Thousands of cultural, sport and labor programs were instituted to thoroughly indoctrinate and produce atheist communists.

At 15-19 one could become a Kosmonol, the final preparation to joining the communist party and greatest honor, but only for those who were full-blown atheists. If one wanted to rise into any position of importance, then one had to adhere to and live the worldview of the cult of communism.  

II. The Biblical Definition of God

Before we can have any fruitful discussion about atheism we need to define what we perceive as 'God'. If I ask a person if they are an atheist, they may reply 'yes'. If I ask them if they believe in some kind of divine energy, or creative intelligence which exists outside of our three-dimensional world, they may also reply 'yes'. On the other hand, a person may claim to be a theist, one who believes in God, yet perceives 'God' as a manifestation of themselves, or a manifestation of the Absolute within creation - that the entire universe is simply 'God'. There are a great number of human ideas about what or who God is, so for our purposes we will give God a Biblical definition arising from what is believed to be what He has revealed of Himself, rather than what people have imagined him/her/it to be.

According to John Blanchard, God is,

"a personal, unique, plural, spiritual, eternally self-existent, transcendent, immanent, omniscient, immutable, holy, loving Being, the Creator and Ruler of the entire universe and the Judge of all mankind" (John Blanchard. Does God Believe in Atheists). 

Blanchard's definition is a Biblical one; therefore, from a Biblical point of view anyone who rejects this definition is either an atheist or agnostic - someone undecided. The Bible states that there is only one God, that all other 'gods' are either man made idols or created beings such as fallen angels posing as gods. This is not to suggest that people throughout the ages have not sincerely believed in their myriad gods and goddesses, but rather to say that within the Bible we are given the only viable definition of God which is immutable (unchanging).

III. History of Atheism

Throughout the ages, from the very earliest of human civilizations, people held a belief in a 'Great God' or 'Highest God'. In the earliest religions going back to the pre-flood era, the idea of monotheism (one God) was prevalent. After the fall, most ancient peoples record being ruled by creatures who claimed to be gods, shifting people's attention away from an invisible Creator to the immediate issue of appeasing those who had power.

After The Flood we have see elusions to monotheism in the writings of the ancients, but again, the attention of cultures was on the immediate problems which they began to associate with lesser gods - the control of weather, wars, destiny, etc. In this sense, there is a universal decline from monotheism to polytheism towards a belief in the powers of evil spirits, etc. The Aryan races had a predominant effect on religion through their promotion of violent gods, and it is only after God Himself intervened through the life of Abraham and his descendents that we witness a group of people who return to the original belief in One God.

The writings of Moses can be dated to around 1300BC, and within them we see a clear definition of the One God. The Jews were unique in their beliefs, yet had a continual influence on the peoples with which they had contact. For example, in the later Vedas and Upanishads, after the Aryan's descendents in the Indu Valley began trading, that a belief in the One High God surfaces again. It is highly likely that contact with Judaism contributed to this change, and in fact Judaism's insistence in One True God influenced the Babylonians who took them prisoner, and eventually the Greeks - the men who applied intellect rather than mere superstition to solving the problem of human existence.

IV. The Early Philosophers

The earliest Greek philosophers such as Thales (585 BC) embraced a form of monism, a belief that the entire universe consisted of similar essence or matter. Socrates placed his hope in knowledge rather than a creator, and was accused of being an atheist because he mostly rejected the mythological gods of the Greeks.

Plato (429-347 BC) came closer to a Divine Creator than his predecessors, but not quite. He taught the idea of a 'Demiurge' who created the world from pre-existent matter and conceived a pyramid of spirits and 'daemon/gods', with the most powerful at the top. He also introduced the idea of the immortality of the soul. Immortality means something which cannot be destroyed. Human souls, in Plato's theory, were tiny pieces of the 'Logos' (God) and therefore, like God, they were indestructible.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was Plato's pupil, a prolific scholar and philosopher who wrote on ethics, logic, zoology, astronomy, botany and other topics. Aristotle's God existed without matter and was, therefore, not subject to change, yet this God remained uninterested in human affairs - detached and cold.

Epicurus (341-270 BC) believed that the world was made up of atoms, indeed, even the human soul was simply a collision of atoms. Epicurus was one of the earliest philosophers to formulate the basic idea of naturalism, a closed system which basically rejects any notion of existence outside of the natural universe. For the naturalist, nothing exists without matter, therefore the Biblical claim of a God who exists outside of the created world as its Creator and Sustainer is rejected absolutely. Epicureanism is often seen as a precursor to modern scientific philosophy in the theory that if something cannot be proven to exist (through the five senses) it should be rejected.

Epicurus is also attributed with being a skeptic because of what we regard as the 'Epicurean Paradox' - a seemingly rational way of disproving the existence of God because of the existence of evil:

If God is willing to prevent evil and not able, then he is not all-powerful.

If he is able to prevent evil and not willing, then he is not all-loving, but malevolent.

If he is both able and willing, then why is there evil in the world?

If he is neither able nor willing to prevent evil, then why call him God?

The Epicurean Paradox may seem, at least on the surface, to be a reasonable argument, yet it fails to consider several important issues. It precludes the notion that evil may be something that God has allowed in order to give His creatures the choice to act freely, if only for a time set by Him. The possibility of evil is essential if real choice between acts of good and evil, which are judged by God, be realized. One may argue that God is ultimately responsible for evil by allowing it; however, evil as a temporal thing may be essential in teaching people the difference between a God who chooses to be absolutely holy, and human beings who, having tasted their potential for evil, reject evil in order to be like God.

V. Pantheism and Panentheism

Pantheism is the idea that the universe/world is God - the trees, lakes, rivers, mountains, roads and shoe shops. Pantheism was first perceived way back in the 2nd century after Christ with what we now call neo-Platonism. Pantheism is a closed system in which we might say that 'God' invents and then reinvents itself through manifesting into various forms. Even in ancient religions this idea was in seed form. The Egyptians divinized the Nile River, the Europeans the Rhine, and so on. Today we have 'Gaia' mythology which is a feminized form of pantheism. 'Mother Nature', 'Mother earth' are both key phrases in Gaia thought, as is the idea of nature's energy.

Pantheism is simply another form of atheism, a form which has major difficulties in answering the most fundamental of questions. If we are simply parts of a stream of life which manifests and dissipates, how can there be any objective truth? If we are caught up in an endless cycle of manifesting energy, why do we sense that we are individuals; what can we use for a basis of morality; how can we explain evil? 

In order to answer some of these questions we have panentheism, which is something of a compromise position between theism and pantheism.

Panentheism holds the same ideas as pantheism with the addition that God is a kind of cosmic energy both within and outside of the system. God in this sense is not eternal, but exists as the force which manifests the world, and the world cannot exist without his/her manifesting powers. Panentheism can suggest that a God/energy also stands outside of creation and that this being/energy has some kind of moral value. Panentheists would argue that Mother Nature punishes us when we destroy the environment - that nature has an identity.

The Renaissance saw the reintroduction of interest in Aristotle's philosophy and sparked the new forms of atheism which have appeared in the past thousand years. Humanism was born at this time - not in particular by atheists, for Roman Catholic scholars such as Erasmus led the charge. Humanism at this time was more about reclaiming the idea of individualism and freedom of thought, especially towards God.

VI. Deism

Onto the scene came the Deists. Deism taught that God was the 'first cause' of everything, but after creation He had basically left the world to work itself out. In this sense, God takes no interest in the world He created and is also impossible to have a personal relationship with. 

It seems a ridiculous idea that a God who took the time to create such a universe as ours would then simply abandon it to its own fate. What evidence could suggest such a thing? For the Deist, the evidence was in the lack of evidence for the continued existence of God. Where was He? Christian theologians, and Christians in general, would easily argue that rather than leaving the world to its own fate, God has revealed Himself in great detail within Scripture, then in the person of Christ, and opened the door to a very powerful and personal experience with Him in which His divine attributes are constantly manifested.

VII. Rationalism and its Allies

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the French mathematician, is said to be the father of rationalism. Descartes reduced everything through a process of doubt until he came to the conclusion for which he is famous, 'Cogito ergo sum', (I think, therefore I am). Reason and knowledge were to become the new religion of the next period. Descartes laid the foundation for rationality to be the filter through which God must be investigated, although this was never Descartes' intention. The Frenchman thought he'd used reason to prove God's existence, but others saw it another way.

Baruch de Spinoza has been labeled a 'hideous atheist'. Spinoza was a rationalist in that he tried to build a philosophy on reason, a monist in that he believed that there was only one 'Substance', and a pantheist because he taught that God existed only within nature and never outside of it. God, for Spinoza, is neither personal nor conscious, intelligent or purposive; God is what we can see, touch, taste, smell, hear and imagine.

The Enlightenment Period, also known as the Age of Reason of the 18th century, was one of scientific optimism. The Bible was being dissected as a piece of superstitious nonsense which would eventually be discarded and replaced by the new god/goddess Reason. What could not be proven scientifically, rationally, must be thrown out. Therefore, all of that stuff about miracles, resurrections, etc., was no more or less than fairy tales from the ancient past. 

John Locke claimed that the senses were the only true way to obtain reason, and then along came David Hume who argued that the only thing our experiences tell us is the fact that we are having experiences. Hume was a skeptic and one of the first philosophers to attack miracles on the basis that they violate the laws of nature. The Age of Reason put humanity dead center and God under our microscope. In a very real sense, we became God and God became the subject of our approval.

VIII. The Modern Atheists and their Philosophies

Modern atheism traces itself back to a different figure. Ludwig Feuerbach studied philosophy under Hegel, a philosopher who believed that 'the State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth', an 'idea' Marx would grab later on. Feuerbach attacked Protestant Christianity, especially the theology of a man called Friedrich Schleiermacher who insisted that the essence of Christianity was a 'feeling of absolute dependency on God'. Feuerbach turned this idea on its head. For Feuerbach, humanity had created an ideal of perfection outside of itself, projected the desire for perfection onto an imaginary being and called it 'God'. This he termed 'wish projection'. 

God, for Feuerbach, was a projection of man's own nature, and for man to reach his destiny God must be taken out of the mind and out of the way. The obvious question that one would want to put to Feuerbach is simply this: "If there is no God, no Creator, then how can destiny exist, for destiny is grounded in the idea of purpose?" Without an intelligent designer existence can have no purpose at all!

Atheism found the perfect partner in the theories of Charles Darwin. In his Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin provided atheism with an answer to the origin of life, or so it appeared. Evolution theory claims that the universe was created by chance - a random collision of atoms and gases which started a process of life. No Creator, no designer, no purpose; it simply happened.  Darwin's theory of Origins has been refuted, challenged and all but thrown out by many leading scientists today, yet it remains, for the only alternative to its atheist conclusions is a God who created the world. 

Today, evolutionists cling to the evidence of micro-evolution, of the adaptation of species, a fact that is both accepted by and embraced by Christians, but micro-evolution is and has never been evidence for macro-evolution - the theory of the origin of life. In short, macro-evolution is silenced by its own theories. The Big Bang theory, or as some call it, 'Time Zero', or 'In the Beginning' screams the question, 'who started the process?’ If we know anything at all about science it is this. For every reaction there is an action, for every effect, a cause.

Feuerbach insisted that the idea of God was standing in the way of human progress, of human destiny. This 'brave new world' mentality simply threw God into a basket labeled 'obsolete' and man proclaimed himself his own creator. Not that man had started the process, no - in this system intelligence just happened, the atoms fused into life-forms, the life-forms mutated and, like magic, intelligence appeared. For the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, God was no longer needed - He was obsolete - and with jubilation he claimed that 'God is dead'.

Into the mix came Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German of Jewish descent. Marx, like Feuerbach before him, attacked Christianity as a 'pie in the sky' mentality. 'Religion is the poor man's opium' he claimed - a substitute for those who don't have and can’t get what they want. Marx saw Christianity as a system which was forcing the poor to submit to the rich. For those countries which were still using a feudal system, this criticism seemed valid. 

Once God was taken out of the picture socialism would work, but socialism wasn't Marx's idea. On the contrary, the first socialists were Christians living in the first century - people who considered each other equals; people who sold their possessions and treated one another as a family. Marx's ideas, or ideals, were put into action through communism. Lenin started the process. Without a God to stand over and judge the proceedings, it seemed logical to simply eradicate any who stood in the way or threatened the cause, such as the intelligentsia; after all, in this system of thought human beings are only complex atomic forms - not sacred in any way. Many were murdered, especially the educated and creative and, of course, those with Christian views and convictions. 

After Lenin, Stalin arrived on the scene, a man convinced that he was the 'superman' who was to come, the human messiah that the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied would come into the world. On the same continent another man was reading Nietzsche and, like Stalin, was convinced that he was the one. The former became the leader of the communist party, the latter the fuehrer of Germany. 

Within the eighty years that atheistic communism ruled in the Soviet Union, 60 million were slaughtered - people who were victims of a regime that used fear as a catalyst for change and death as a punishment for noncompliance.

IX. Existentialism.

The Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is regarded as the father of theistic existentialism. Kierkegaard was writing against the dry, traditional, and mostly impersonal Protestant Christianity of his time. For Kierkegaard, faith must be an experience, an intensely personal 'existence', therefore, the term 'existential'.

But existentialism, as it is more commonly understood, is connected to extreme atheism. Atheistic existentialism has little or no sense of humankind, or even society - it is a solely individualistic idea. Every individual must make him/herself what he/she will become, without reference to God. Existentialism, from a social perspective, is a reaction against urbanization, industrialization, and any other thing which tends to destroy individuality and make people a mere cog in the great machine. Such was the teaching of Martin Heidegger (189-1976). Man in the center may seem like a positive ideal, but without God, existentialism heads down a road which has dire consequences.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the French philosopher, was a dramatist, essayist and novelist who used the media to get his message across. He described himself as an atheistic existentialist. He once described an experience where he was sitting in a cafe and felt that another person was staring at him. He claimed that this gave him a feeling of being dehumanized, of reducing him to an object. If God were thus gazing at him, it would make him feel the same. In other words, God's all-seeing eye, for Sartre, made him feel that his self was being diminished, and the only way to make himself feel like a subject, rather than object, was to deny the existence of God. 

The result of Sartre's philosophy was to realize existence itself as completely meaningless; indeed, he claimed that there was 'absolutely no reason for existing'. The universe without God was a cold, uncaring, unfeeling place which existed without purpose or meaning, and humanity was trapped in a void of insignificance. In this philosophy, no human endeavor is any more important than any other - all are equally useless. A half-drunken laborer, picking his teeth with a toothpick, or a violinist picking his strings in the London Symphony Orchestra, are of equal significance or insignificance - it's just a matter of personal taste.

Yet existentialism had further to go and took the next step through Albert Camus (1913-1960). Camus was strongly influenced by the atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche, but it was his partnership with Sartre which caught popular attention. When their plays, films and books arrived on American shores, their ideas took root. Camus popularized the word 'absurd', a word he used to describe anything in human experience which contradicted the human desire for happiness, purpose and justice. Camus' existentialism led him to the ultimate conclusion of atheism, that 'life is a bad joke' and the only thing left to discuss is suicide. Once God is eliminated from a worldview, the world itself becomes the enemy.

But there is another step in this tragic stroll towards the exaltation of self. We call it 'nihilism'. Nihilism is the logical conclusion of atheistic existentialism and atheism in general. Nihilism claims that 'there is no reason why the universe exists and no goal towards which it is moving; nothing is of real value; human existence is totally meaningless; human beings are biological accidents; there is no life after death and suicide could therefore be a more rational approach than the desire to go on living' (John Blanchard).

X. Conclusions

We could go on to speak about materialism, an atheistic view that we are nothing more than complex biological machines whose only value is in the minerals that our bodies contain and the gold we may have in our teeth. Determinism is another atheistic view which means that everything we do is determined by what is hereditary and environmental. The world is a closed mechanical thing which is progressing along a path, evolving as it should with no purpose or end. Humans are just a part of the machine and we have no real choice over our actions; we are simply acting instinctively as determined by nature.

If we apply simple logic to atheism it destroys atheism completely. The very fact that atheists, like everybody else, are trying to find some meaning to life, albeit by trying to destroy belief in God, should tell us that human beings have an instinct that we are not just a random collision of atoms. Most of those who claim to be atheists do not live as atheists. We have laws in our societies which reflect moral values. 

Where do moral values originate? This question cannot be answered in atheistic terms. Moral values do not exist in the natural world. Yes, there are those things we call natural laws, but these are not moral laws. Animals, insects, fish and birds act on instinct; they are driven by it, and always act within such boundaries. But human beings have the freedom to choose. Our legal systems are set up to provide us with a world where at least a measure of order exists, for without moral laws the world would slide into total chaos.

The other creatures we inhabit this planet with do not need moral laws - something, or someone, gave them moral boundaries which they never cross; they do not have the freedom of choice. No person can live in a society without obeying the moral law which the society dictates; indeed, nobody wants to, even the atheist. Why do human beings understand the need for moral laws? Where do such concepts as love, justice, fair-play, purity, sympathy, compassion and enmity come from?

The Bible's answer to this question is that humans are the only creatures made in God's image. We, like our Creator, are self-aware, and although we exhibit what the Bible calls sinful and rebellious characteristics, part of His image remains. If it didn't, this world would be 'every man for himself' - the very foundation of atheism - and this world would be a thousand times more violent and dark than it is at present. But atheism takes self-awareness and turns it into self-adoration.

Atheists, like all people, are conscious of themselves as individuals. It is self-awareness which separates humanity from all other earthly creatures. This self-awareness makes us ask the profound questions about our existence and purpose - a question that never enters the mind of the rest of creation. However, if we place self in the center and make our individuality the ultimate, and then decide that as individuals we can make our own laws as 'self' determines, what will be the result? Existentialism went down that path, but not completely into chaos, because most reject atheism. 

The end result of atheism is a life without reason, a meaningless day to day non-existence which ultimately gives as much value to suicide as to life. Surely, we are not given the ability to create music, poetry, art, love of children and family, the ability to weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh, the compassion to reach out to the oppressed and give justice to the wronged -  surely we are not given all of this without reason, without purpose.

All rational people seek answers to the big questions because there is a part of us - call it an instinct or reflection of our origin - which calls us upward towards perfection. Even the atheist is trying to find perfection, to find meaning; but when God, the source of our purpose is denied, our purpose ceases to exist.

I hope this video/article has been informative for you.  

Steve Copland