By HITCHENS_JNR
Updated: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:57:56 UTC

I'm lucky enough to be attending a series of lectures that form part of the preparation for this year's Oxford-Princeton Graduate Exchange seminar in ancient history. The seminar tends to be on a topic connected with ancient religion - and this year the theme is "Weak Belief, Differing Belief and Unbelief in Antiquity". The rationale behind this is simple - skeptics tend to leave few traces in the primary source record in the ancient period, and so they can get overlooked when we write religious history. This seminar is intended to begin to redress this habitual scholarly oversight. As the speaker in the opening lecture put it: "New Atheism has had a lot of publicity in recent years. Now let's give Old Atheism its due!".

Anyway, the first lecture was given by David Sedley, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and author of Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity. His theme was "The atheist underground in Plato's Laws". I found it fascinating and curiously uplifting, and I figure that some people here might be interested too. So I'm going to give a brief(ish) summary of it, and, if people seem at all interested and the Mods will tolerate it, I may likewise summarise some of the future lectures in the series if they're any good.

The Atheist Underground in Plato's Laws

It's a commonplace for ancient historians to assert that atheism was practically non-existent in the ancient world, but this goes against the explicit witness of Plato's Laws, the tenth book of which is an attempted refutation of atheism. In this book, Plato claims that there were "many" atheists in Athens (although there may be a touch of "MacCarthyite exaggeration" going on here, as Sedley put it), that there lived in the city numerous sages who circulated prose and verse works attacking the existence of the gods, and that this philosophy was especially attractive to the city's young people. Beyond this Platonic testimony, Sedley drew attention to "The Sisyphus Fragment", a partially-preserved text from the late fifth century BCE which expounds an openly atheistic argument in dramatic verse, and also to the existence of groups like the Kakodaimonistai, (lit "Worshippers of the Evil Spirit"), a classical Athenian drinking club who openly mocked the gods by performing acts of sacrilege and holding feasts on days of ill-omen. Both of these, in different ways, are clear evidence of forms of religious skepticism in Plato's Athens.

In Laws 10, Plato gives a summary of an argument which was supposedly popular among his contemporary atheists. The traditional scholarly position is that this "atheist argument" is a Platonic confection, a made-up straw man against which Plato (the William Lane Craig of his day) could claim an easy victory. However, Sedley believes (on stylistic and philosophical grounds that I won't go into here) that this section of the text in fact preserves authentic atheist arguments from Plato's time. Plato's "atheist argument" is that the universe came about through the interplay of Nature and Chance, and that Nature is the best guide to what is true and good. "Craft" (techne), being a product of humanity rather than nature, is a later innovation and an inferior guide to truth and goodness. Gods, so the argument runs, are clearly a product of "craft", or "man-made" as we might say today (support for this is adduced from the fact that the same gods have wildly different characteristics in different parts of the Greek world). In fact the argument goes so far as to say that religion is the invention of politicians and law-makers. The last part of the argument is strikingly similar to the Sisyphus Fragment, which likewise argues that religion was invented by lawgivers as a way to police the morality of subjects and keep them subservient.

I wasn't fully persuaded by Sedley's reconstruction of an "atheist underground" sustained by anonymously circulated pamphlets of explosive atheist philosophy (I'm not sure we have the evidence to sustain such a specific hypothesis), but he certainly convinced me that we should take Plato's witness seriously on this, that there really were atheistic currents in classical Athens. And, contrary to the popular perception of Athens, it certainly wasn't "open-minded" enough to tolerate public, unrepentant atheism.

Anyhow, I was rather inspired to consider these suppressed classical atheist arguments, to reflect on the lives of the brave people who held these views, and to realise that, as an atheist, I am part of an intellectual tradition far older than Christianity.

I hope someone out there found this interesting and, if you want to follow it up further, the Sisyphys Fragment (aka the Critias Fragment, after a dubious attribution of authorship) can be read here (it's only 42 lines).

TAGGED: ATHEISM, HISTORY