Poetry

Atheism per se did not exist until modern times. The Greeks and Romans had defined an atheist not as someone who disbelieved in God but as someone who rejected the traditional gods who protected the social order. Hence Socrates was an atheist, and so, in the eyes of the pagan Romans, were the early Christians. Almost everyone in the ancient and medieval worlds believed in a deity or deities. Atheism as we now know it, McGrath explains, grew up in one specific place, Western Europe (and its outposts in America and elsewhere), as a phenomenon of a specific time, the dawn of modernity, and as a reaction against a specific religion, Christianity. The roots of atheism, McGrath suggests, lay paradoxically in that primal phenomenon of Western modernity, the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers’ efforts to purify the institutional church in order to make it more concordant with their vision of Jesus’ authentic teachings generated a loss of trust in institutional religion in general. Furthermore, McGrath argues that the Refomers, by focusing upon the Bible as the sole source of God’s revelation, effectively desacralized both the natural world and the secular human world, which in the integralist medieval Catholic view had been equally saturated with God’s sacred presence. With the Reformation, “God became an absence in the world,” writes McGrath.

Secular rulers’ efforts to mediate the inevitable conflicts that developed between Catholicism and Protestantism and between different strains of Protestantism by mandating religious tolerance and limiting the influence of religion in public life led many to deem religion irrelevant and religious differences risible, like the squabbles between the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders in Gulliver’s Travels. Add to that the rise of Cartesian skepticism and scientific naturalism among 17th-and 18th-century intellectuals, who tried to subject supernatural claims to laboratory-style empirical proof. If you could not prove the existence of God scientifically—and who can?—He must not exist.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Poetry

Literature

Atheism per se did not exist until modern times. The Greeks and Romans had defined an atheist not as someone who disbelieved in God but as someone who rejected the traditional gods who protected the social order. Hence Socrates was an atheist, and so, in the eyes of the pagan Romans, were the early Christians. Almost everyone in the ancient and medieval worlds believed in a deity or deities. Atheism as we now know it, McGrath explains, grew up in one specific place, Western Europe (and its outposts in America and elsewhere), as a phenomenon of a specific time, the dawn of modernity, and as a reaction against a specific religion, Christianity. The roots of atheism, McGrath suggests, lay paradoxically in that primal phenomenon of Western modernity, the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers’ efforts to purify the institutional church in order to make it more concordant with their vision of Jesus’ authentic teachings generated a loss of trust in institutional religion in general. Furthermore, McGrath argues that the Refomers, by focusing upon the Bible as the sole source of God’s revelation, effectively desacralized both the natural world and the secular human world, which in the integralist medieval Catholic view had been equally saturated with God’s sacred presence. With the Reformation, “God became an absence in the world,” writes McGrath.

Secular rulers’ efforts to mediate the inevitable conflicts that developed between Catholicism and Protestantism and between different strains of Protestantism by mandating religious tolerance and limiting the influence of religion in public life led many to deem religion irrelevant and religious differences risible, like the squabbles between the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders in Gulliver’s Travels. Add to that the rise of Cartesian skepticism and scientific naturalism among 17th-and 18th-century intellectuals, who tried to subject supernatural claims to laboratory-style empirical proof. If you could not prove the existence of God scientifically—and who can?—He must not exist.