When and where did atheism first start ?

[Cod]

When you say "before we invented gods," it sounds as if we were going along with no notion of gods and then came up with the idea out of whole cloth.

No. I'm talking about a considerable amount of time before these ideas evolved, which as you say would have been fuzzy ideas at best.

 

People tried to figure out how the world worked. They attributed various events to various kinds of forces and agents. Some of these are what we would now call natural, and some weren't. Some were anthropomorphized, and some weren't. 

Gawdzilla and other lazy thinkers act as though people used to be honest empiricists until some guy had a fantasy. That suits the general anti-religion ideology around here, but it's a comic book view of history.

I don't think I've said "some guy had a fantasy." 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.

Before any such explanations occurred to early primates, it makes sense to call them atheist in the sense that dirt is atheist, or the empty space in a box is atheist: it lacks belief because it has no belief. It has no belief because it has no abstract thought or the capacity to try to explain.

The before and after would have been a vast amount of time.. I mean it's not as if on a Friday no explanations had occurred to them and then on Saturday morning it all became clear.

[Belacqua]

No. I'm talking about a considerable amount of time before these ideas evolved, which as you say would have been fuzzy ideas at best.

[...]

I don't think I've said "some guy had a fantasy." 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.

[...]

The before and after would have been a vast amount of time.. I mean it's not as if on a Friday no explanations had occurred to them and then on Saturday morning it all became clear.

Yes, that seems much more reasonable. 

It's a matter of semantics, I guess, whether these fuzzy ideas, which may or may not develop into something more traditionally religious, counts as theism. 

If people want to be strict about definitions and say that because these early concepts lacked the characteristics of Zeus or Jehovah, then the believers were atheist, I won't argue. Though it seems like nitpicking to me. 

Early people tried to explain things. They didn't have the scientific method yet. Many of the explanations they came up with involve personal agency, intentionalism in nature, and human-like emotion in natural forces. This was understandable. 

Whether their approach was a "default" approach or not I don't know, but if anyone is currently holding to the same explanations today, the atheists here will certainly not be in agreement. It's not like 1) there was atheism, 2) hey, maybe it's gods, and then 3) thank Dawkins it's atheism again. That's dumb.

[Cod]

No. I'm talking about a considerable amount of time before these ideas evolved, which as you say would have been fuzzy ideas at best.

[...]

I don't think I've said "some guy had a fantasy." 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.

[...]

The before and after would have been a vast amount of time.. I mean it's not as if on a Friday no explanations had occurred to them and then on Saturday morning it all became clear.

Yes, that seems much more reasonable. 

It's a matter of semantics, I guess, whether these fuzzy ideas, which may or may not develop into something more traditionally religious, counts as theism. 

If people want to be strict about definitions and say that because these early concepts lacked the characteristics of Zeus or Jehovah, then the believers were atheist, I won't argue. Though it seems like nitpicking to me. 

Early people tried to explain things. They didn't have the scientific method yet. Many of the explanations they came up with involve personal agency, intentionalism in nature, and human-like emotion in natural forces. This was understandable. 

Whether their approach was a "default" approach or not I don't know, but if anyone is currently holding to the same explanations today, the atheists here will certainly not be in agreement. It's not like 1) there was atheism, 2) hey, maybe it's gods, and then 3) thank Dawkins it's atheism again. That's dumb.

Can I go now?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm saying that when early humans tried to explain the world, it was natural and understandable that they would picture causal agency, other-than-human powers, and thinking agents that reflected the way they themselves thought. If early humans were at all thinking beings, offering the very earliest explanations for how things work, it is close to a default premise for them to assume that other things work the way we do. Only bigger, in the case of volcanoes, for example. 

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as 'inventing gods', in precisely the same sense that later humans invented the scientific method.

Boru

[Abaddon_ire]

<snip for brevity>

No pushback from me on your objections.

I found it fascinating just to read the essay. One does not commonly get an insight into how missionaries think when confronted by intransigent natives.

[The Grand Nudger]

There’s a potential lag of 200k years from biological modernity to the first indications of so much as a belief in -human- spirits, let alone gods. It’s safe to say that deism and theism are (relatively) recent developments of full modernity, occurring sometime after modernity, 50k years ago. The same trend is noticeable even in here, where evidence of god belief can only be found in a fraction of the subset.

Even modern “primitive” beliefs are just as far removed as complicated theologies from their behavioral origins. No one of the primitives sprang Firth fully formed as they are, and their beliefs have changed even within the timeframes observable in a single human life.

[mordant]

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.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Perhaps it went something like this:

Oog was at the local creek, and after checking carefully for any of those big-toothy-eat-you things, he filled his gourd with water.  While travelling back to the rock under which he planned to sleep that night, he stumbled and a little bit of water spilled out of the gourd.

When he woke the next morning, Oog saw lots of puddles on the ground.  He knew that this only happened after the water fell out of the sky.  For the first time, he noticed how much the puddles looked like the splash of water that had fallen out of his gourd.   Maybe, Oog thought to himself, there's a great big Oog who lives in the clouds and he has a great big gourd.  Sometimes Sky Oog spills water out of his gourd.  Of course, it's a much bigger gourd and makes correspondingly bigger spills and splashes and puddles.

Oog just invented gods.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

The prevailing theory, at present, is that it wasn’t anything even remotely as intentional or thoughtful as that. People had dreams. When the awoke, it was completely unsurprising that they populated the waking world with the dream caricatures manufactured by the human psyche. To this day, dream visions are compelling evidence to the faithful.

[comet]

right after the first person said "God did it!!!"