Chapter 5
Atheists Throughout History
The history of reasoned atheism is as old as the history of thought.
Benjamin Warfield, theologian[1]
Strap in and hang on. You’re about to find out where unbelief comes from and how it got where it is. It’s been making trouble for longer than most people know.
The First Atheist
Do you believe in Apollo?
Anaxagoras didn’t, so the Greeks threw him in jail.
Anaxagoras was born around 500 BCE in what’s now Turkey. He headed to Athens, probably the most advanced Greek city-state, and set up as a philosopher -- well before Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others got famous doing the same thing.
The Greek religion said that the sun was actually the golden deity Apollo, but Anaxagoras said that it was just a hot rock. What’s more, he said, everything in the earth and sky came from natural forces and materials, not godly ones.
Athenian lawmakers knew a troublemaker when they heard one. Somewhere in the 430s, they arrested Anaxagoras on the charge of impiety. He left the city-state soon thereafter, because the Athenians kicked him out -- or possibly because they condemned him to death (or some other harsh punishment), and he picked up his toga and ran.
Anaxagoras probably wasn’t the first in Western civilization to speak and write about the world in a nontheistic way. He wasn’t even a complete atheist. He seems to have believed that a mind permeates the universe.
But he may have been the first to become widely famous (and infamous) for saying that the gods that everyone else worships just don’t exist. He was so notorious that years later, when Socrates was called an atheist, the old man ridiculed the charge by asking, “Do you imagine that you are accusing Anaxagoras?”[2]
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