Undoubtedly closer to truth is the claim made in the fifth book of his Nature of the Gods by Posidonius, whose friendship we all share: that Epicurus does not believe in any gods, and that the statements which he made affirming the immortal gods were made to avert popular odium.--Cicero De Natura Deorum 1.123
Atheism, we are so often told, is a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment: it would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth. This is a myth nurtured by both sides of the "new atheism" debate: adherents wish to present skepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science's progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent Western world consumed by capitalism. Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills...There have been many throughout history and across all cultures who have resisted belief in the divine...It is of course undeniable that religion has dominated human culture as far back as we can trace it....Too often religious practices is imagined to be the regular state of affairs, needing no explanation, whereas any kind of deviation is seen as weird and remarkable. This view underpins the modernist mythology: the Post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world. This is a dangerous misprision. To the religious, it can suggest that belief is somehow universal, essential too the human condition, and that creeping secularism is an unnatural state. Atheists...can be seduced into delusional self-congratulation, as if twenty-first century middle-class westerners have been the only people throughout history capable of finding problems with religion. Religious universalism--the idea that belief in gods is the default setting for human beings--is everywhere in the modern world. There is a growing trend toward speaking of religion as "ingrained," or even "hardwired" into the human subject.--Tim Whitmarsh Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, 4-5.
I am sometimes told, by historically sophisticated acquaintances, that atheism and nationalism are nineteenth century inventions. While there are solid reasons to accept both of these claims (the 'modern' nation state is indeed, well, 'modern'), an attentive reader will encounter nationalist themes and atheists (see the quote by Cicero above) in earlier writings. (Of course, one will have to be careful not to be misled by modernizing translations.) When, in discussion, I marshal evidence to cast doubt on the 'it started during the nineteenth century,' I am told that I use anachronistic concepts or interpret the evidence anachronistically. I have already noted, inspired by work by my former colleague Daniel Schneider, that the ban on anachronism and the preference for so-called actors' categories is methodologically not as innocent as its proponents belief--by adopting actors' categories we also (often tacitly) take sides in historical debates because (a) the concepts are contested and/or (b) we efface other possibilities (that were taboo or not-popular).
So, I was very pleased to read Whitmarsh's book, which explores ancient atheism as itself (eventually) an intellectual tradition in a very accessible fashion. (Philosophers looking for careful analysis of distinct arguments will be more disappointed.) Above, I have quoted from Whitmarsh's (introduction and conclusion which provide his) error theory. This makes clear that the myth of 'atheism started during the nineteenth century,' is itself, in part, dependent on a myth of modern nationalism (as a byproduct of the invention of the 'secular state' in which the nation is the glue - the civic religion [or worse] -- that helps hold it together [or worse]).
More important: what Whitmarsh's error theory suggests is that the reception of the European Enlightenment understands itself as a revolution in human affairs in which major social-conceptual innovations have taken place--post 1800 there is room for atheism, nationalism, and (modern) science. {And, yes, there is also a whole discourse that modern science is a nineteenth century invention with some precursors during the Galilean-Newtonian revolution.) The error theory also suggests that there is a kind of path-dependency for these ideas/concepts such that they require a prior intellectual and social-political revolution before they are possible for creatures like us.
Thus, the error theory tracks a deep commitment of a teleological species of historicism. I mention this not just because Whitmarsh does not mention historicism but also because neither the New Atheists nor the religion is "hardwired" into the human subject folk (backed up with fantastic brain scans when they cognitive religious studies) have much truck with historicism (philosophically both orientations incline toward dogmatic realists). Both presuppose, as Whitmarsh notes, that our epoch is somehow special: in fact, both rely on an image of science in which it is authoritative. (And, of course, historicists religiously guard against anachronism.) I mention historicism, in particular, because historicism facilitates the idea that one's time is special; as Fred Beiser teaches in his magisterial book on the German Historicist Tradition, it is constitutive of this tradition that it opposes universalism and searches for individuality of given culture or era. In addition, these individual cultures/eras become strangers to each other.
This is not to deny, first, that sometimes the practices and concepts of the past are strange (nor that surface similarity can hide real differences) and second, thus that history can generate novelty or that there are socio-conceptual breaks or deviations from the past. As Whitmars suggests (echoing without acknowledgment the argument of Hume's History of Natural Religion), "The apparent rise of atheism in the last two centuries...is not a historical anomaly; viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic religions." (242) I have no idea if he is right about this claim because the book does not provide systematic evidence for it. I also do not wish to deny, third, that when we engage with the past little is gained if we merely project -- often without realizing it -- our own preconceptions onto the past. [In my experience this actually happens quite a lot to overconfident historicists.]
I close with an observation. Whitmars spends a lot of time on Epicurean claims about the Gods. He pretty much decides that their views, while clearly inclining toward atheism, are inconsistent because they do affirm the existence of the Gods. Oddly, he misses the idea, uttered in Cicero's dialogue (that he discusses extensively), that "Epicurus does not believe in any gods, and that the statements which he made affirming the immortal gods made to avert popular odium." Obviously that's only an interpretation; but it is one offered by the ancient sources.
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