Posted: Jan 18, 2019 9:17 pm
zulumoose wrote:I would say that scientific views, and in particular ToE, rather than driving atheism, simply help to remove some of what (for CERTAIN people) are obstacles to dismissing religion.
Many people believe what they are comfortable with, and NEED to believe something about origins, such that if religion provides any comfortable gap filler for them they lean towards it.
People who are comfortable with "I don't know" as a perfectly rational and reasonable answer to the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything, have no such tendency to lean on the side of religion in the first place. Such people are naturally dismissive of the religious tendency to claim to have answers, which are almost always vague and unsatisfactory to a rational mind anyway.
You are saying here that sceptical materialism is a fairly obvious default position for at least some people, with or without the discovery of scientific laws of physics or the theory of evolution?
If that is the case, then I would expect to see a good deal of evidence for people accepting sceptical materialism as a worldview before the 17th century, when modern science got under way. Among the thousands of religions and belief systems which historians and anthropologists have documented, I would expect to see a fair number which could be described as sceptical materialism, with no supernatural entities or powers bestowing rewards on the virtuous and punishments on evildoers. In fact, as far as I can tell from some googling (largely in the Wikipedia article on the history of atheism here), there are almost none. There are occasional individual atheists and some ancient Greek and Indian (notably Charvaka) schools of philosophy (which don’t seem to have been accepted by their wider societies), and atheism is repeatedly mentioned, but almost always as a term of abuse. I am open to correction.
The abstract of a 2016 article “Hunter-gatherers and the origin of religions” here speaks of “the universality of religion across human society”, and all of the 33 representative hunter-gatherer populations which are studied had some sort of belief in spirits, none are remotely sceptical materialist.
The Asian religions such as Buddhism and Taoism may not be examples of theism, since they don’t necessarily involve gods, but they are also a long way from sceptical materialism; they teach that the guiding principles of the universe (e.g. Dharma, Tao) are closely connected with human morality.
In classical Greece and Rome being an atheist was apparently a crime punishable by death, and early and mediaeval Christianity took a similar line. It’s noticeable that although there were repeated instances of heretic groups in Christian countries, none were atheist or materialist – the absence of atheism wasn’t just fear of the authorities. Again, there were a few atheists, but nothing approaching the modern numbers. Generally, atheism was a charge used to attack enemies, and when the French word “athéisme” was coined, it was a term of abuse through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
According to the same Wikipedia article on the history of atheism, the beginnings of modern atheism were at the same time as the beginnings of modern science, and this was not a coincidence. It took the form of deism, belief in a god who did not intervene, but instead left the world to run itself according to natural laws. The early scientists had discovered the natural laws which made this outlook possible. Quoting from the article (my bolding):
According to Geoffrey Blainey, the Reformation in Europe had paved the way for atheists by attacking the authority of the Catholic Church, which in turn "quietly inspired other thinkers to attack the authority of the new Protestant churches". Deism gained influence in France, Prussia and England, and proffered belief in a noninterventionist deity, but "while some deists were atheists in disguise, most were religious, and by today's standards would be called true believers". The scientific and mathematical discoveries of such as Copernicus, Newton and Descartes sketched a pattern of natural laws that lent weight to this new outlook. Blainey wrote that the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza was "probably the first well known 'semi-atheist' to announce himself in a Christian land in the modern era". Spinoza had been expelled from his synagogue for his protests against the teachings of its rabbis and for failing to attend Saturday services. He believed that God did not interfere in the running of the world, but rather that natural laws explained the workings of the universe. In 1661 he published his Short Treatise on God, but he was not a popular figure for the first century following his death: "An unbeliever was expected to be a rebel in almost everything and wicked in all his ways", wrote Blainey, "but here was a virtuous one. He lived the good life and made his living in a useful way. . . . It took courage to be a Spinoza or even one of his supporters. If a handful of scholars agreed with his writings, they did not so say in public".
During the eighteenth century, acceptance of deism and then atheism spread, mostly among intellectuals who would have known all about the advances of science. The French Revolution spread atheist ideas, and there were numerous atheists and atheist movements in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, with the atheism of communist societies, atheism was accepted by large numbers of ordinary people for the first time in the history of our species.
As far as I can tell, the growth of atheistic materialism closely paralleled the growth of science - science considered both as a way of understanding the world and as the basis of new technologies. I certainly agree that neither atheism nor the scientific worldview entails the other, but historically they do appear to be connected. I am especially struck by the fact that every hunter-gatherer society which has been studied has some kind of religion (the article on hunter-gatherers linked above suggests that the earliest religions were probably animism); religion seems to be as old as our species, if not older.
OK, pull my amateur googling apart.