There’s a popular impression that disbelief in God is peculiarly modern. Some folks claim that people in past ages did not doubt the existence of God.⁹⁵ It’s true that, contrasted with medieval society, Christian or Muslim, belief in God measurably erodes with economic, technological, and scientific advances. However, atheism has always been there. Wherever there are theists, there are people who doubt their claims.

If atheists are not free to argue their case, there will be fewer atheists in the population, just as, anti-Marxists not being free to argue their case in Soviet Russia, there were fewer anti-Marxists in the population. And those who do exist will be less vocal; they will often pay lip service to the official ideology or at least keep their mouths shut. But there will still be some such dissident thinkers.

What has changed since the Middle Ages is not so much the private questioning of God’s existence as the possibility, in a liberal legal framework, of being able to publicly deny God’s existence without hazard to life and limb. To say that we can’t find much atheism in medieval Europe is like reporting that we can’t find much homosexuality in Colonial New England or much in the way of demands for free speech in 1950s Russia.

In all cultures, at all stages of history, most people are not imbued with zeal for the official doctrine imposed by the government. It makes no difference whether this doctrine is Christianity, Hinduism, Atheism, Communism, or Fascism. Most people go along with it, especially if painful penalties are inflicted for failure to toe the line, but they are not deeply enthusiastic. Ideological zeal, including religious zeal, never seizes more than a small minority of the population, though they may for brief periods sweep others along with them in their excitement. No doubt we’ll eventually find the group of genes responsible for susceptibility to ideological zeal.

Most people are not by temperament attracted to abstract intellectual systems of any kind, and when they encounter some such system, will pay it lip service if this is helpful to them in their everyday lives, and otherwise ignore it. Thus, most people in the United States today would never dream of identifying themselves with atheism, precisely because they attribute so little importance to the God question. Today’s atheists are atheists because they care far more about the God issue than most nominal theists do. Most Americans simply don’t care enough about God to get worked up about his existence, one way or another, so naturally they are horrified both by outright atheism and by ‘fanatical’ religiosity. It’s partly a matter of tact. Since the small minority of enthusiastic believers in God are known to be terribly touchy, ordinary people believe in God in the same way that they believe their best friend’s wife doesn’t look her age.

Historical Traces of Grassroots Skepticism

Psalm 14 informs us: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”⁹⁶ This was written no later than the second century B.C.E., perhaps a good bit earlier. The poet recognizes the existence of closeted atheists, even while abusing them, and since he goes on to attribute all kinds of immorality to this private denial of God’s existence, he must judge discreet atheism to be widespread. The “fool” referred to is not such a fool as to declare openly that there is no God, for then he and his family would probably be physically attacked by theists.

In pagan Greece and Rome, though those cultures were far more tolerant than medieval Christendom or Islamdom were later to be, atheism was generally punishable by death. ‘Atheism’ at this time usually meant denial of the numerous traditional gods, and so the early Christians were often denounced as atheists by those in power.

Several ancient thinkers, especially Democritus (around 460-370 B.C.E.), Epicurus (around 341-270 B.C.E.), and Lucretius (around 99-55 B.C.E.) propounded basically materialist views of the universe, and have often been suspected of atheism, though their atheism is not unanimously accepted by classical scholars. Epicurus explicitly stated that there are gods, but they don’t care about humans and have nothing to do with us. I find it difficult to read Lucretius’s great work, On the Nature of Things, without judging him to be an atheist through and through.

In Plato’s The Laws, composed around 346 B.C.E., the character known as the Athenian Stranger begins his exposition of the Cosmological Argument by explaining that an argument for the gods’ existence is necessary, because some people don’t accept it:

Fire and water and earth and air, they say, all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . in this way and by these means they brought into being the whole Heaven and all that is in the Heaven, and all animals, too, and plants, . . . not owing to reason, nor to any god or art, but owing, as we have said, to nature and chance.⁹⁷

Medieval Europe was a near-totalitarian society in which the media were completely controlled by one institution, which harbored no namby-pamby inhibitions about burning or dismembering any dissenters. Anyone who (for example) contended that life after death would not literally restore the physical stuff of the original bodies of the deceased, or that Jews and Muslims might not end up in Hell, would be set upon by the Church’s hired thugs and tortured to death unless they promptly recanted. Medieval Europe was an ‘age of belief’ in precisely the sense that Russia between 1918 and 1980 was an age of belief: state terror was routinely employed to stamp out deviations from the official line. The fundamental reason why you and I have even heard of Christianity is centuries of state terror in its behalf. Christians were less than ten percent of the population of the Roman empire at the time of the conversion of Constantine in 312 C.E., and they might never have become very much bigger by purely peaceful persuasion.

Some time around 1200 C.E., Peter of Cornwall (Prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate) wrote:

There are many people who do not believe that God exists. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than by Providence. Many people consider only what they can see, and do not believe in good or bad angels, nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body.

This is quoted by the historian Robert Bartlett, who comments on this case and that of a Scottish Cistercian lay brother who concluded that there is no life after death: “simple materialism and disbelief in the afterlife were probably widespread, although they leave little trace in sources written by clerics and monks.”⁹⁸ Few except clerics and monks could write. The records cited by Bartlett are rare written traces of an ever-present reality: disbelief in God and in survival after death are, always and everywhere, simple common sense. This does nothing to show that these views are correct: simple common sense can easily be wrong and often has been. We just ought to face the fact that privately conceived atheism is always endemic at the grass roots, whatever official ideologues may say.

The most brilliant philosopher of the fourteenth century, William of Ockham, maintained that we should not try to use philosophical reasoning to prove the existence of God, which he thought should be based purely on faith. In the course of defending this position, Ockham wrote:

The proposition ‘God exists’ is not known by itself, since many doubt it; nor can it be proved from propositions known by themselves, since in every argument something doubtful or derived from faith will be assumed; nor is it known by experience, as is manifest. (Ockham 1990, pp. 139-140)

Later the Church made it obligatory for Catholics to believe that the existence of God can be proved by reason alone. Reading these remarks by Ockham, we can see how they might assist the Devil in putting skeptical doubts into the minds of believers.

Thomas Tailour was a fuller by trade, though apparently literate, in fifteenth-century England. He was disciplined for uttering the following heresies: calling people “fools” for going on a pilgrimage, saying it was pointless to worship images of saints, disparaging the learning and the moral behavior of priests, questioning the need for baptism, and maintaining that the soul dies with the body, as the flame of a candle dies when blown out.

Tailour had to publicly renounce these views and each day for the rest of his life say the Pater Noster five times, the Ave Maria five times, and the Credo once. If he didn’t stick to this, or if he again voiced his heretical beliefs, he would be burnt to death. He was made to carry around with him the firewood that would be used for this purpose. Tailour’s explicit heresies did not include denial of God’s existence, or he might not have gotten off so lightly.

The historian John Arnold comments that this case was exceptional in that a record of it happened to survive (Arnold 2005, pp. 2-3). Arnold footnotes a number of specialized scholarly articles on medieval unbelief and skepticism and cites several actual cases (pp. 216-229). I like the reports of people who argued that if Christ’s body had been the size of a mountain, it would long ago have been completely devoured by Christians celebrating the eucharist. Amidst the bloody nightmare that was Christendom, some bright sparks of critical intelligence alleviate the general gloom.

In the sixteenth century John Calvin argued that everyone is aware of God, but acknowledged that “there were some in the past, and today not a few appear, who deny that God exists.”⁹⁹ Calvin knew that there were more than a few atheists around, even though anyone owning up to being an atheist was taking his life in his hands. Calvin himself, as advisor to the government of Geneva, was prepared to have people executed for much less than atheism, for example for denying that Jesus was the son of God. In its early years, Protestantism was even more violently intolerant than Catholicism. The persecution of dissidents got much worse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in both Protestant and Catholic countries, than it had been in the Middle Ages.

The fact that confessing one’s atheism would lead to one’s body being incinerated or vivisected without anesthetic naturally meant that many individual atheists would be reticent, or would publicly deny their atheism. In some cases this was so obvious a possibility that it was generally rumored at the time. Very likely Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon were atheists, for all their protestations to the contrary, and their contemporaries certainly believed it of them. We can never be sure just which eminent thinkers were closeted atheists, though I have my own suspicions about some outwardly very pious personages. David Hume barely tried to conceal his atheism, though he was still a little cautiously irenic: even in eighteenth-century Britain, people had been executed for heresy within living memory.

Why Does Classical Theism Rule the World?

The worldwide dominance of classical theism is a feature of only the last fifteen hundred years. It’s essentially a consequence of the spread of Christianity and of Christianity’s imitator, Islam. Christianity and Islam are still making converts; both are expanding as a proportion of the world’s total population. Both are strongest among the poor of the Third World, and both lose support wherever there is economic development.

If people do not have an innate need to believe in God, why has theism become so dominant?

From the getgo, Christianity was different from earlier religions in that it included an explicit command to preach to the entire world (a project favored by the existence of the Roman empire and the freedom of movement within it). People conquered by Assyria or Egypt, for example, adopted Assyrian or Egyptian gods, but the Assyrian and Egyptian priesthoods didn’t send out missionaries beyond their empires. Christianity was spiritually imperialist: the world must be remade in our image; everyone must think as we do. Islam emulated Christianity in this, as in so much else, though whereas Christianity had three centuries of dissemination by personal persuasion before it took up the sword, Islam was born sword in hand.

Thus there is a specific historical explanation for the fact that the world is now dominated by theism. But there’s also a more general explanation of what has made theism attractive to so many. People have innate tendencies which may, in the appropriate cultural circumstances, strongly favor belief in God. Among these innate tendencies are the following five:

1. An appetite for satisfying explanations.

People are born programmed to make sense of the world, to fit everything that interests them into a meaningful pattern. This appetite is a powerful influence in both religion and science.

What makes an explanation satisfying? One important element is finding unity in diversity. There is something deeply gratifying in discovering, or thinking one has discovered, that different things are somehow really the same. This is the insight of Emile Meyerson’s Identity Principle, which Meyerson propounded to account for the development of science.

Meyerson argued that all attempts to explain anything spring from a basic tendency of the human mind: to deny diversity and insist upon sameness, in both space and time. This tendency is resisted by the details of experience, so it takes the form of looking for something constant behind the fleeting appearances. The Identity Principle successfully explains the impetus behind Einstein’s search for a unified field theory in physics, but it is also active in the development of religious ideas.

2. A tendency to attribute intentions to all observed entities.

Divining other people’s intentions is a basic human skill. Divining the intentions of other animals, both those you want to eat and those who want to eat you, is also valuable. It’s more costly to fail to attribute intentions where these exist (in a prospective mate, a sexual rival, or a bear) than to attribute intentions where they do not exist (in a storm, a river, or a corpse).

People instinctively impute intentions to objects. They become angry with an electronic appliance or even a piece of furniture that misbehaves. Poker players can often be heard pleading: ‘Give me a ten, a ten on the river’, even when these players are quite well aware, at the level of sober reflection, that this supplication is totally ineffective.

This spontaneous mental impulse to suppose that things have purposes, or can be changed by mere words, is at the heart of magic, and elaborate magical thinking always permeates any culture in which theistic religion is born. Today we witness the power of magical thinking in such everyday expressions as ‘if looks could kill’ and in the popularity of books and movies in which the heroes have ‘super powers’, powers usually exercised by mental acts of will.

3. A tendency to treat elements of the imagination as though they were external entities.

A hallucination, a dream, a daydream, or a ‘weird experience’ may be interpreted as a perception of something external to the mind, when it is in fact (as far as we can tell) purely internal. Occasional minor hallucinations are extremely common, especially in the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Most people, at one time or another have ‘heard a voice’ when falling asleep or waking up, for example they hear someone calling their name. More intense hallucinations are less common, but by no means rare. Attempting to make sense of such experiences may easily lead a person to classify them as perceptions of another world, a different realm of existence.

4. A tendency for imaginary structures to be modeled after familiar human social structures.

If a person is familiar with the institutions of aristocracy or royalty, and also believes in spirits, he will tend to attribute these human institutions to the world of spirits. Spirits will tend to be conceived of as being aristocratic in relation to ordinary humans, and to being arranged hierarchically with a king at the top.

The emergence of the great monotheistic religions followed on centuries of glorification of absolute human rulers—Sargon, Nebuchadnezzar, Xerxes—who styled themselves “king of kings.” In Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity, God sits on a throne. ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’ and ‘Christ’ means ‘anointed’, which is to say, a king. “Every knee should bow” to Christ (Philippians 2:10).

5. A tendency, in any belief-system, to move to more extreme positions on those points deemed important.

It has been observed that sometimes, particularly in times of economic depression, people are led by an invisible hand to act more concerned about their dress than they would ideally like to act. If a person typically feels that his prospects for advancement are influenced by his appearance, and if he judges the penalties of being ‘over-dressed’ as less serious than the penalties for being ‘under-dressed’, then he will tend to ‘dress up’. Thus he becomes part of the perceived reference of other people who are thereby impelled to dress more formally, and in this way the interaction of everybody’s observations and actions acts as feedback, to push everyone toward more dressiness.

Such points of doctrine may include the estimable qualities of the leader. At first the adherents of the belief-system may feel that the leader has valuable insights they can learn from. Gradually they are made to feel uncomfortable if they assert any shortcomings whatsoever in the leader. As this process unfolds, the community of believers moves toward the position that the leader is the most exalted of beings. Thus we move by stages from the view that Mao is, under the circumstances, the best man for the job of party chairman, to the position that Mao is the greatest all-round genius in human history and that pondering brief quotations from his writings can enable you to play better table tennis.

This is the process that led so many people from the view that one god is more exalted than all the others, to the view that there is just one very powerful God, and then to the view that this God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all the rest of it. This doctrine surely did not emerge because evidence or arguments were found in its favor, but it becomes understandable as the outcome of a process of interpersonal interaction among committed ideologues competing with each other for approval. If we just take all the most impressive things about a God and make them as extreme as we can, we arrive at classical theism. It’s the same interpersonal process that exalts the status of Sargon, Caesar, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, as well as Osho and L. Ron Hubbard. Once it becomes hazardous to one’s health to hold a less exalted conception of God than the consensus of other believers, an automatic interpersonal process ensues, driving this consensus towards ever more expansive claims, culminating in the God of classical theism.

All these five tendencies are inherent in the human condition. #1 through #3 are genetically programmed tendencies of psychology, varying in intensity with individuals, while #4 is a typical exercise of the imagination, and #5 arises spontaneously within any group defined by enthusiastic adherence to a set of ideas. It becomes clear, just by making a few obvious extrapolations from these tendencies, that there exists the possibility that belief in God will emerge in a culture, if certain cultural conditions happen to come about.

I reject the view that that there is some specific human appetite for a God, while accepting that there are innate human tendencies which can easily lead to belief in God. Add those innate human tendencies to the specific historical circumstances of the origin and spread of Christianity, and we have the skeleton of an adequate explanation of the dominance of theism today.