Battling The Gods: Atheism In The Ancient World

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –July 25, 2016

Prof. Charles Sarvan

The “Socratic dialogue was never aggressive; rather it was conducted with courtesy, gentleness and consideration. If a dialogue aroused malice or spite”, it had failed (Karen Armstrong, The Case For God).

At root, I think my opposition to militant atheism is based on a commitment to the very values which inspire atheism: “an open-minded commitment to the truth and rational inquiry”. Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with a dogged conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is antithetical to such values (Julian Baggini, Atheism).

Tim Whitmarsh, Battling The Gods: Atheism In The Ancient World, London, 2016.

It has been suggested that human beings created god(s) out of fear, ignorance and wishful-thinking: fear because we were confronting fierce animals, armed only with primitive weapons; ignorance because we couldn’t understand and explain most of natural phenomena; wishful because we couldn’t face the thought of our individual, final, extinction, plus other temptations such as justice in another world, and reunion with loved ones. As both our domination and understanding increased, so god decreased in size. However, as this book’s dustjacket states, “Long before the Enlightenment sowed the seeds of disbelief in a deeply Christian Europe, atheism was a matter of serious public debate in the Greek world. But history is written by those who prevail, and the Age of Faith mostly suppressed the lively free-thinking voices of antiquity.” History being written by the winners, the author aims to recover the suppressed voices of the minority (p. 8).

Generally, polytheism is more hospitable and accommodating than monotheism with its sacred scripture which is seen as a non-negotiable contract with the divine (p. 29) demanding orthodoxy – and with orthodoxy comes the politicization of religion. (The Greeks had no sacred texts.) But in ancient Greece, the work of priests was to carry out religious rituals: the idea of priests trying to “sway public debates” (p. 21) was unthinkable. “Legal judgement was never theologized in ancient Greece” (p. 22): Whitmarsh is Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. Philosophy celebrates the critical spirit, the willingness to question received beliefs and values: when the Greeks pondered the nature of the world, they did so through philosophy and religion, and not through organized religion (pp. 54 & 52). Religion was not used by the Greeks to drive and justify historical events. “No war was ever fought for the sake of a god, no empire was expanded in the name of proselytization, no foe was crushed for believing in the wrong god” (p. 193).

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