A New Book Looks at How Atheism Shaped Western Civilization

[rug]

February 25, 2014
By Hemant Mehta

We often hear about how religious believers and their ideas and inventions shaped modern history, but less examined is how atheists — with their persistent questioning and challenging of orthodoxy — influenced the world in which we live.

Mitchell Stephens has written a new book exploring precisely that aspect of religion. (Call it the “Old Atheism,” if you will.) His book is Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

In the excerpt below, Stephens looks at unbelief in places where the written word wasn’t a part of society:

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.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/02/25/a-new-book-looks-at-how-atheism-shaped-western-civilization/