Is Monotheism an Anomaly? History of Atheism in the Ancient World | Tim Whitmarsh.

Is religious belief a 'default setting' for humans and how new is atheism? Cambridge Professor Tim Whitmarsh claims that ancient history suggests that atheism is as natural to humans as religion. Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

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References:
Whitmarsh Tim. 2015. Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. Knopf.
The Cambridge History of Atheism edited by Stephen Bullivant & Michael Ruse. Cambridge University Press. 2021.
Review by Richard Janko, University of Michigan
Stephens, Mitchell. 2014 Imagine There's No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World.
Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011)
Henri Bergson, Extraits de Lucrèce (1884)
Leo Strauss, “Notes on Lucretius” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)
Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (2014) Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Special thanks to my Prof. of History of Atheism at UC Irvine, Dr. Joseph McKenna.