When and where did atheism first start ?

[Belacqua]

I think I was clear that I wasn't talking about modern humans. I think the concepts were still fuzzy for very early humans, and the ideas of what was alive, and what had emotions, and what needed to be cooperated with, was nowhere near what it is for us on this forum. 

So the early humans were by default, atheists with questions.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. 

They probably thought that there were different non-human powers in the world, they probably anthropomorphized somewhat. They didn't have the concepts that we do, of supernatural/natural, or natural/divine. 

If an early human goes to great lengths to appease the unseen forces of the bison hunt in order to eat through the winter, but lacks the modern concept of a god, is he an atheist? I think that's getting too hair-splitty about definitions. 

I think we have built in desires to explain how the world works. Maybe it works like a language -- the desire and the basic structure is built in, but the specifics are learned from whatever society the child finds herself in. In a religious society, she learns religion as the explanation. In a logic-only society, she learns logic as the explanation.

Yes, which just backs up what I said about the default position.  

Please explain why.

In a theistic sense, I take the term faith to mean "I'm believing this on poor, or no evidence." I wouldn't use the term faith in the way that you describe.

You can use it however you want, I don't much care about definitions. The point is that a person raised in a given society will be likely to think that his society's explanations for things is pretty good. And that's the case whether the kid comes from an animist hunter-gatherer group or a sciency group.

So why did you object to atheism being the default position in human beings? (Yes I know atheism wasn't even a thing back then, but I'm sure you know what I mean)

No, I don't know what you mean. 

I think that early humans were very likely to come up with explanations that we moderns would call god-like. The power that controls the hunt, who listens to our requests and might get angry if we don't do things right. The power that causes earthquakes, who might be in a bad mood. 

Thinking of human psychology, it seems more likely to me that these god-like concepts would be a part of people's earliest thinking, than that people remained pure empiricists until some conman invented the concept of a god. So at the time, given how people's minds work, explaining the world through god-like forces seems closer to a default than not.