(July 10, 2019 at 4:25 am)Cod Wrote: I'm of the opinion that the God idea evolved slowly in the minds of early humans. Keeping in mind the position they were in it's understandable why Gods would be an appealing proposition.
My view is that human mentation is pretty sloppy and imperfect, rife with confirmation bias and agency inference, because we evolved that way to function in a hunter-gatherer environment. And this is what leads to religious ideation, and specifically, to the failed epistemology of religious faith. Religious faith has been the rule rather than the exception until recently. The rise of the modern scientific method around the time of Newton, and the Enlightenment, and the relative peace and prosperity that becomes possible in industrial and technological societies, had a lot to do with it. Even today, those of us who are atheists have often worked long and hard to improve self awareness and pry faulty thinking out of our skulls.
The word "atheist" dates only to the late 16th century. This doesn't mean there weren't atheists before then -- there were, doubtless, back to the dawn of man, as others have suggested -- but it does mean there was no particular impetus to concoct the label until then. Probably, it was labeled things like "blasphemer" until such time as it was even thinkable to form concepts like "areligious" and "godless" that suggested it was even theoretically possible for individuals and groups to function without any religion at all without being swallowed by the earth and conveyed strait to perdition. When society was affluent enough to pay philosophers to think about such things, the modern terms came into being.
So, unlike you, I tend to think religion was the rule because to be superstitious is a strong tendency of the human mind because of its operational weaknesses, and because an empirical grasp of reality based on anything like science simply didn't exist. Prior to the past few hundred years (at best), if you had niggling doubts about your religion, the most you could maybe do is change religions or denominations and the freedom to do even that was limited and in many cases non-existent for practical purposes. People who didn't practice the approved rituals were cast out of the group, and might be in peril of death. So there weren't atheists as such, so much as people mischaracterized as "witches" and "warlocks" and hermits and such. Knowing what I know now, if I was forced to take a one way trip in a time machine to the 14th century, I would probably live a life of solitude with minimal contact with Other People. That would be preferable to going through elaborate motions to appear pious in order to get by.
