The origins of atheism

[Freodin]

...
-Honestly believe they are a god.
...

Hm... that would mean that God is and atheist, wouldn't it?

Or it would mean that you are wrong... pick your choice. )

 

[Freodin]

My suspicion is that the first mumbo-jumbo chanting priest/shaman/prophet and the skeptic who didn't believe may well have been one and the same person.

You might be correct.

Hello Freodin

Hi David! Good to see you again!

 

[juvenissun]

Hello there everyone. I am sure this has been discussed before but I would like to start a new discussion on this. I want to hear your opinions on why do you think atheism exists and its cause. I will tell mine only after I see yours.

Because God not only creates human, but also creates animals. With all those examples around, atheists can't help to think that they are nothing but smarter, civilized animals.

 

[juvenissun]

[QUOTE="Eudaimonist, post: 68625221, member: 6065" I had found my rational enlightenment.


eudaimonia,

Mark[/QUOTE]

What did you find?

 

[Oafman]

Before even our distant ancestors had evolved the imagination to create all of the various religions, there was atheism.

 

[Wryetui]

Before even our distant ancestors had evolved the imagination to create all of the various religions, there was atheism.

Could you give us some proofs of what you are saying?

 

[Archaeopteryx]

Atheism is a spiritual problem, not an intellectual one.

In other words, it stems from the heart, not the brain.

Psalm 14:1a The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.

That's what believers like to tell themselves.

 

[Wryetui]

What can I say. The answers here were a bit disappointing to be sincere. I will tell my opinion on why atheism exists, and I hope I will explain myself fine because I think it's toph.

I want to start from the beginning, with philosohpy, because in order to understand the post-modern minds we have to understand the forces that shaped the Western civilization and that, in my opinion, caused atheism. Let's start, as I said, with philosohpy, and with someone that is appreciated in my religion, Plato.

For the ancient greek philosophers and especially for Plato, there is a form of cognition that is non-discursive, that means that it does not take place in lenguage. Most people are familiar with Plato's dividing line from "The Republic" where he makes a distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible or ideal world of ideas, then he divides the intelligible world into two parts.

For him, there is a higher form of cognition than mathematic reason or dialectic, this is the direct, unmediated, vision of "the good" or "the beautiful". This ultimate contemplation, or "theoria" of "the good" or "the beautiful" is the end of dialectics, but it is not something we can produce or practice as we can practice dialectics. This ultimate "theoria" comes, we can only be ready for it. We can only prepare for it, because this "theoria" is beyond our knowledge and is external from us.

This approach will be developed by the later platonists, missnamed "neo-platonists" such as Plotinus and Proclus and a deep religious outlook is formed, one that will have a titanic impact on Orthodox spirituality. While the platonists had no concept of God as a personal being and certainly no concept of creation ex-nihilo, but they believed in the ultimate transcendence of the good and the fact that it relies beyond speech and beyond dialectics and discursive reason as well as beyond sensory experience provided a way for Origen and Evagrius to express their belief in the transcendent God of the hebrews revealed in the person of Christ in the cultural idiom of their own day.

While this thought was charged with some dangers and Origen's ideas was proof enough of that it cannot be denied that when combined with a pshychological insight and exercises borrowed from the stoics provided the neptic Fathers with powerful conceptions and tools for explicating the Orthodox path to the knowledge of God.

At some point, the patristic vocabulary became standardized and the word "nous" started to referr exclusively or almost exclusively to this higher, non discursive faculty of cognition. "Theonia" came to referr exclusively to the lower, discursive faculty of cognition, and this usage, in fact, goes all the way back to Plato. This standardization stands with the fact that it corresponds with real, lived experiences in the lifes of the Fathers.

Thus, the Fathers speak of the purification of the heart of the soul, the "nous" and its descent into the deep heart of men as the necessary precondition of the inmediated encounter with Christ, indwelling through the Holy Spirit.

At some point, however, and here comes the origins of atheism, in my opinion, this form of higher cognition dissappeared completely in the Western culture, and so the possibility of knowing God by purificating yourself in order to become intuitively aware of Him.

Some Orthodox theologians as Fr. John Rommanides are to put the blame for this at the shoulders of Saint Augustine, but this would be quite unfair for the bishop of Hippo. Most recently, some roman-catholics theologians have pointed to Duns Scotus as the cause for this. Despite who is right and the truth relies somewhere in the middle, by the dawn of the modern era in the Western civilization only two forms of cognition existed: the impression or through the discursive reason. With the arise of the scientific method, combining these two a new form was created and it remains until this day as the dominant intellectual paradigm of modernity: scientific rationalism. And yet, in spite of its appearences, philosophicly speaking it's a failure. David Hume knew that it was a failure when he wrote his inquiry concerning human understanding. He began his book by asserting that when we think we think about two kinds of things: matters of fact (sensed data) and relations of ideas and the rest of his book lead him to discuss the problem that this kind of thought made.

The modern era is characterized by three distinct attitudes: first, that human beings are essentially individuals; second, that human reason—and this will later be expanded to include the scientific method—is autonomous; and third, that human reason is sufficient to answer our needful questions and solve our problems.

Let’s begin with this new-fangled belief that human beings are essentially individuals. Aristotle wrote, and more than once, that to be human is to be in community. In fact, he defines man as a political, that is, a social, animal. A man who deliberately absents himself from society is, according to Aristotle, either a god or an animal, that is, he is either above humanity or below it. The one thing he is not, however, is a human being. In fact, so strong was this belief among the Greeks that the Greek word for individual is actually “idiot.”

Now, this belief is shared by all pre-modern peoples, and even today by most non-European societies. The modern cult of the sovereign individual marching to the beat of his own drummer is a European invention. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who despised modernity for a number of other reasons, called the triumph of the individual the greatest flower of modernity.

We may wonder, then, what brought about this great shift. The introduction of nominalism into medieval philosophy certainly had something to do with it. Nominalism is the position that only individual things exist. General terms referring to abstractions such as “humanity” or “human nature” are just names. Thus, a nominalistic anthropology would aver that there is really no such thing as humanity, only individual people.

The emerging new physics may have also played a role. Thomas Hobbes thought of humans explicitly along the lines of discrete bodies in motion, that is, if the natural world is made up exclusively of discrete material bodies moving in space, then people can be defined in much the same way. Hobbes made this anthropological physics the basis of his famous political philosophy.

In addition, however, we should also consider the influence the loss of the concept of nous may have had. The noetic faculty is one of pure intuitive apprehension. Its vision of the beautiful and the good is direct and unmediated. The discursive reason, on the other hand, is object-oriented. It is directed either towards sense-data or towards its own internal structure. In either case, however, thought is mediated by symbols or language. It is not too difficult to see how this could lead to the idea that each person is an individual cognitive center. In religion, this leads to the idea that each person is an individual interpreter of the Scriptures.

As long as one assumes that the natural world that all of these individuals perceive is one and uniform and that reason itself is universal and uniform, all is well. Once, however, one begins to entertain doubts about the objectivity of the world or of the universality of reason, then the whole program begins to unravel. I call this unraveling "post-modernism".

By way of contrast, let me draw your attention to the writings of the Fathers, particularly the greatest of the 20th-century theologians, Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Whether discussing the life of his mentor, St. Silouan, or his own experiences, Archim. Sophrony tells us that when the nous has been purified and encounters God in pure prayer, the soul becomes consciously aware not only of the unity of mankind but of all creation. This leads to the shedding of bitter tears for the world. These tears are not the product of sentimentality or emotion, but are a divine gift enabling the one who prays to enter into Christ’s intercessory prayer for all of creation. Do you see how the Orthodox method of prayer, noetic prayer, even when practiced by a monk living alone in a remote cell, leads not to egoism and isolation but to a noetic unity with God and with all of mankind?

 

[Eudaimonist]

What did you find?

Many things, among them an honest view of reality.

I no longer had to rely on foreign narratives to determine my views, but was able to form them in epistemologically valid ways. This also had the benefit of eliminating inner-conflict, such as in settling the matter of evolution versus Genesis, which I had been unable to do before because of religious commitments to Genesis. Achieving rational enlightenment was like slowing tearing down a wall, brick by brick, with a sudden final collapse that freed me to see clearly -- to finally see through the light of reason unhindered. It was a relief to finally have the unrestrained capacity for full integrity and personal authenticity and agency.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[fat wee robin]

I am not sure when it first came about but I can say that Archaeology and Anthropology reveal that as far back as we can see in the earliest civilizations they can find, all people everywhere sensed and knew of something that was there outside of the visible realm that as responsible for all this, that was there concerned about them, influencing them, and each civilization eventually developed cult regarding how to approach this realm (maybe even a simultaneous quantum reality if one wishes to think in these terms)...they wanted to contact this realm, seek this realm, please and appease this realm, and made prayers, rituals, oblations, and sacrifices (each of their own doing) that effected their relationship with this realm. We see things indicating this is various understandings of God, the gods, and forces, and in ornamentation, table statues, burial rites and so on and later in their writings.

So mankind is inherently religious or at least spiritual and only in the past couple of 1,000 years has soem of mankind sought to explain every aspect of reality in physical terms only. I like the approach of physicist Fritjof Capra...to get a full understanding of what it means to be human one has many avenues of exploration...the scientists is just as important as the theologians and philosopher in understanding our life and our world and neither is MORE correct and neither is MORE incorrect (except in some details). The Universe for me is Spirit and Life and matter/energy...the study and experience of each in its own place and the need for understanding of it all is who we are....

Just my $.02

Paul

Well that was worth a lot more than $.02 .

 

[Archaeopteryx]

What can I say. The answers here were a bit disappointing to be sincere. I will tell my opinion on why atheism exists, and I hope I will explain myself fine because I think it's toph.

I want to start from the beginning, with philosohpy, because in order to understand the post-modern minds we have to understand the forces that shaped the Western civilization and that, in my opinion, caused atheism. Let's start, as I said, with philosohpy, and with someone that is appreciated in my religion, Plato.

For the ancient greek philosophers and especially for Plato, there is a form of cognition that is non-discursive, that means that it does not take place in lenguage. Most people are familiar with Plato's dividing line from "The Republic" where he makes a distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible or ideal world of ideas, then he divides the intelligible world into two parts.

For him, there is a higher form of cognition than mathematic reason or dialectic, this is the direct, unmediated, vision of "the good" or "the beautiful". This ultimate contemplation, or "theoria" of "the good" or "the beautiful" is the end of dialectics, but it is not something we can produce or practice as we can practice dialectics. This ultimate "theoria" comes, we can only be ready for it. We can only prepare for it, because this "theoria" is beyond our knowledge and is external from us.

This approach will be developed by the later platonists, missnamed "neo-platonists" such as Plotinus and Proclus and a deep religious outlook is formed, one that will have a titanic impact on Orthodox spirituality. While the platonists had no concept of God as a personal being and certainly no concept of creation ex-nihilo, but they believed in the ultimate transcendence of the good and the fact that it relies beyond speech and beyond dialectics and discursive reason as well as beyond sensory experience provided a way for Origen and Evagrius to express their belief in the transcendent God of the hebrews revealed in the person of Christ in the cultural idiom of their own day.

While this thought was charged with some dangers and Origen's ideas was proof enough of that it cannot be denied that when combined with a pshychological insight and exercises borrowed from the stoics provided the neptic Fathers with powerful conceptions and tools for explicating the Orthodox path to the knowledge of God.

At some point, the patristic vocabulary became standardized and the word "nous" started to referr exclusively or almost exclusively to this higher, non discursive faculty of cognition. "Theonia" came to referr exclusively to the lower, discursive faculty of cognition, and this usage, in fact, goes all the way back to Plato. This standardization stands with the fact that it corresponds with real, lived experiences in the lifes of the Fathers.

Thus, the Fathers speak of the purification of the heart of the soul, the "nous" and its descent into the deep heart of men as the necessary precondition of the inmediated encounter with Christ, indwelling through the Holy Spirit.

At some point, however, and here comes the origins of atheism, in my opinion, this form of higher cognition dissappeared completely in the Western culture, and so the possibility of knowing God by purificating yourself in order to become intuitively aware of Him.

Some Orthodox theologians as Fr. John Rommanides are to put the blame for this at the shoulders of Saint Augustine, but this would be quite unfair for the bishop of Hippo. Most recently, some roman-catholics theologians have pointed to Duns Scotus as the cause for this. Despite who is right and the truth relies somewhere in the middle, by the dawn of the modern era in the Western civilization only two forms of cognition existed: the impression or through the discursive reason. With the arise of the scientific method, combining these two a new form was created and it remains until this day as the dominant intellectual paradigm of modernity: scientific rationalism. And yet, in spite of its appearences, philosophicly speaking it's a failure. David Hume knew that it was a failure when he wrote his inquiry concerning human understanding. He began his book by asserting that when we think we think about two kinds of things: matters of fact (sensed data) and relations of ideas and the rest of his book lead him to discuss the problem that this kind of thought made.

The modern era is characterized by three distinct attitudes: first, that human beings are essentially individuals; second, that human reason—and this will later be expanded to include the scientific method—is autonomous; and third, that human reason is sufficient to answer our needful questions and solve our problems.

Let’s begin with this new-fangled belief that human beings are essentially individuals. Aristotle wrote, and more than once, that to be human is to be in community. In fact, he defines man as a political, that is, a social, animal. A man who deliberately absents himself from society is, according to Aristotle, either a god or an animal, that is, he is either above humanity or below it. The one thing he is not, however, is a human being. In fact, so strong was this belief among the Greeks that the Greek word for individual is actually “idiot.”

Now, this belief is shared by all pre-modern peoples, and even today by most non-European societies. The modern cult of the sovereign individual marching to the beat of his own drummer is a European invention. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who despised modernity for a number of other reasons, called the triumph of the individual the greatest flower of modernity.

We may wonder, then, what brought about this great shift. The introduction of nominalism into medieval philosophy certainly had something to do with it. Nominalism is the position that only individual things exist. General terms referring to abstractions such as “humanity” or “human nature” are just names. Thus, a nominalistic anthropology would aver that there is really no such thing as humanity, only individual people.

The emerging new physics may have also played a role. Thomas Hobbes thought of humans explicitly along the lines of discrete bodies in motion, that is, if the natural world is made up exclusively of discrete material bodies moving in space, then people can be defined in much the same way. Hobbes made this anthropological physics the basis of his famous political philosophy.

In addition, however, we should also consider the influence the loss of the concept of nous may have had. The noetic faculty is one of pure intuitive apprehension. Its vision of the beautiful and the good is direct and unmediated. The discursive reason, on the other hand, is object-oriented. It is directed either towards sense-data or towards its own internal structure. In either case, however, thought is mediated by symbols or language. It is not too difficult to see how this could lead to the idea that each person is an individual cognitive center. In religion, this leads to the idea that each person is an individual interpreter of the Scriptures.

As long as one assumes that the natural world that all of these individuals perceive is one and uniform and that reason itself is universal and uniform, all is well. Once, however, one begins to entertain doubts about the objectivity of the world or of the universality of reason, then the whole program begins to unravel. I call this unraveling "post-modernism".

By way of contrast, let me draw your attention to the writings of the Fathers, particularly the greatest of the 20th-century theologians, Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Whether discussing the life of his mentor, St. Silouan, or his own experiences, Archim. Sophrony tells us that when the nous has been purified and encounters God in pure prayer, the soul becomes consciously aware not only of the unity of mankind but of all creation. This leads to the shedding of bitter tears for the world. These tears are not the product of sentimentality or emotion, but are a divine gift enabling the one who prays to enter into Christ’s intercessory prayer for all of creation. Do you see how the Orthodox method of prayer, noetic prayer, even when practiced by a monk living alone in a remote cell, leads not to egoism and isolation but to a noetic unity with God and with all of mankind?

Long-winded response to a simple question with a relatively simple answer.

 

[fat wee robin]

Many things, among them an honest view of reality.

I no longer had to rely on foreign narratives to determine my views, but was able to form them in epistemologically valid ways. This also had the benefit of eliminating inner-conflict, such as in settling the matter of evolution versus Genesis, which I had been unable to do before because of religious commitments to Genesis. Achieving rational enlightenment was like slowing tearing down a wall, brick by brick, with a sudden final collapse that freed me to see clearly -- to finally see through the light of reason unhindered. It was a relief to finally have the unrestrained capacity for full integrity and personal authenticity and agency.


eudaimonia,

Mark

Good as long as you have no problem with non existence when you die .

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Logical negation, that's the big issue. If only we could ban that, everything would be fine...

 

[fat wee robin]

Long-winded response to a simple question with a relatively simple answer.

No ,a wonderful beautifully explained piece of Truth . Poor you that you refuse to or
are unable to enter in .

 

[Eudaimonist]

What can I say. The answers here were a bit disappointing to be sincere.

They are honest, even if they disappoint you.

And I am very much opposed to Plato. Even though he is one of the greatest philosophers, ironically he had almost ruined philosophy with his mysticism. Aristotle had, at least, set it on a better course, even if he was still contaminated by Plato to an extent.

I do agree that removing Platonic influences may have helped people avoid placing too much epistemological authority on this so-called "higher cognition", which is not a higher form of cognition at all.

The modern era is characterized by three distinct attitudes: first, that human beings are essentially individuals; second, that human reason—and this will later be expanded to include the scientific method—is autonomous; and third, that human reason is sufficient to answer our needful questions and solve our problems.

Let’s begin with this new-fangled belief that human beings are essentially individuals. Aristotle wrote, and more than once, that to be human is to be in community. In fact, he defines man as a political, that is, a social, animal. A man who deliberately absents himself from society is, according to Aristotle, either a god or an animal, that is, he is either above humanity or below it. The one thing he is not, however, is a human being. In fact, so strong was this belief among the Greeks that the Greek word for individual is actually “idiot.”

Modernity is correct, and Aristotle did not show that we aren't individuals. He pays very close attention to our individual natures in his writings. When he describes people as social animals, he's not saying that we aren't individuals, only that we live and flourish (achieve eudaimonia) in society. It takes a straw man atomistic view of individualism to think that he denied our individual natures. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, each of us, in order to be individuals. Even if we learn about the world in part through discussion with others, we are still able to think and learn as individuals. There is no need to take an Obama-like "your didn't build that!" position with regards to knowledge. Aristotle himself realized the need for philosophers to be trained in dialectic, so that they could arrive at truths for themselves.

The modern cult of the sovereign individual marching to the beat of his own drummer is a European invention. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who despised modernity for a number of other reasons, called the triumph of the individual the greatest flower of modernity.

Nietzsche is correct.

In addition, however, we should also consider the influence the loss of the concept of nous may have had. The noetic faculty is one of pure intuitive apprehension. Its vision of the beautiful and the good is direct and unmediated. The discursive reason, on the other hand, is object-oriented. It is directed either towards sense-data or towards its own internal structure. In either case, however, thought is mediated by symbols or language. It is not too difficult to see how this could lead to the idea that each person is an individual cognitive center.

It still takes "discursive reason" to double-check that one is using nous correctly, and doesn't just use it as an ink blot in which one may see anything. It is true that something like beauty is apprehended directly, but discursive reason is needed to tell you that just because a woman is beautiful, that doesn't mean that the goddess Aphrodite exists.

In religion, this leads to the idea that each person is an individual interpreter of the Scriptures.

Oh, the horror.

Once, however, one begins to entertain doubts about the objectivity of the world or of the universality of reason, then the whole program begins to unravel. I call this unraveling "post-modernism".

True, but the view that individuals are capable of independent reasoning is a counter to the nonsense of post-modernist attacks on reason, just as much as it is a counter to the Platonic mysticism. Post-modernism and Platonic mysticism are two sides of the same coin. They both fundamentally opposed to reason, and seek to undermine reason. They are brothers in crime.

I do agree with what seems to be your main point, as garbled as it is by your mysticism -- reason leads to atheism.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[Wryetui]

They are honest, even if they disappoint you.

And I am very much opposed to Plato. Even though he is one of the greatest philosophers, ironically he had almost ruined philosophy with his mysticism. Aristotle had, at least, set it on a better course, even if he was still contaminated by Plato to an extent.

I do agree that removing Platonic influences may have helped people avoid placing too much epistemological authority on this so-called "higher cognition", which is not a higher form of cognition at all.



Modernity is correct, and Aristotle did not show that we aren't individuals. He pays very close attention to our individual natures in his writings. When he describes people as social animals, he's not saying that we aren't individuals, only that we live and flourish (achieve eudaimonia) in society. It takes a straw man atomistic view of individualism to think that he denied our individual natures. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, each of us, in order to be individuals. Even if we learn about the world in part through discussion with others, we are still able to think and learn as individuals. There is no need to take an Obama-like "your didn't build that!" position with regards to knowledge. Aristotle himself realized the need for philosophers to be trained in dialectic, so that they could arrive at truths for themselves.



Nietzsche is correct.



It still takes "discursive reason" to double-check that one is using nous correctly, and doesn't just use it as an ink blot in which one can see anything. It is true that something like beauty is apprehended directly, but discursive reason is needed to tell you that just because a woman is beautiful, that doesn't mean that the goddess Aphrodite exists.



Oh, the horror.



True, but the view that individuals are capable of "autonomous reason" is a counter to the nonsense of post-modernist attacks on reason, just as much as it is a counter to the Platonic mysticism. Post-modernism and Platonic mysticism are two sides of the same coin. They both seek to undermine reason.


eudaimonia,

Mark

We two are the best examples of this fundamental issue I explained. While I and my Church follow the mystic path and consider the other paths inferior and useless in order to achieve knowledge of God, you consider our path a product of our mere minds and the path of materialism to be the one, true path in order to achieve knowledge of something.

Both modernity and Nietzsche are correct in your opinion and vision, but I do not agree with them. Ironically, in the Orthodox Church, we think Plato is a bright star because he is the proof of the reminiscence of God that humans still have form the garden of Eden, and we think Aristotle ruined the West with his metaphysical views that eventually led to scholastics and the loss of connection with God in favor of the use of autonomous reason.

 

[juvenissun]

Many things, among them an honest view of reality.

I no longer had to rely on foreign narratives to determine my views, but was able to form them in epistemologically valid ways. This also had the benefit of eliminating inner-conflict, such as in settling the matter of evolution versus Genesis, which I had been unable to do before because of religious commitments to Genesis. Achieving rational enlightenment was like slowing tearing down a wall, brick by brick, with a sudden final collapse that freed me to see clearly -- to finally see through the light of reason unhindered. It was a relief to finally have the unrestrained capacity for full integrity and personal authenticity and agency.


eudaimonia,

Mark

I see. You want freedom in your thought. You don't like restrictions (teachings) given by this system and that system. When you sensed that kind of teaching, and you don't like it, you will reject it. At the mean time, you will accept all teachings you do like. That is what you called the honest view. It is honest to yourself.

If so, where do you put the value of learning? A major part of learning is trying to accept something which is alien and difficult to you at the first place. Is it a good thing for a child to go to school? How many children like schooling? Do they have to do it?

 

[fat wee robin]

That is not quite correct - the problem you are ignoring is that of the available (potential) sources.

I already wanted to make the distinction between active and passive atheism before I read your post, but it fits in here quite well.

The problem is that both kind of atheists - the ones who simply don't believe or bother with "the spiritual", and the ones who actively proclaim their disbelief and disagreement with theistic claims - do not leave much source material, especially "in the earliest civilizations".
Non-verbal sources are already difficult to interpret: does that painting on a dark cave wall have some "magical" meaning, or is it just artistic expression? But one can safely say that people who do not believe in a magical component of cave paintings do not leave magic paintings on cave walls.
No source for these atheists.
As for the active atheists: without verbal sources it is quite difficult to find out if there were humans who disagreed with the "prayers, rituals and sacrifices". They didn't leave learned essays shredding their theistic opponents.

I like to think that as soon as there was some mumbo-jumbo chanting priest / shaman / prophet, there was a skeptic who didn't believe it.

Well yes as a Christian I think it is optional for those who have not yet 'arrived in the truth '.Just as infants in school need lots of pictures ,repetition,learning by heart etc ., those in the lower level of religious belief need a lot of ritual and repetition ,and told what to believe,but once the Holy Spirit appears in the life ,one needs very little .
All great Scientists are at this level, where they are minimally deist .
Some hold back from stating they belong to any religious faith ,in order to prevent predjudice and melange with their scientific work .
Unfortunately the big religions especially the RCC do not want their flock
to become too clever,as they could not control them ..
In other words some people are atheists because the churches are so bad in their
role of teaching the truth and of behaving as christians .

 

[juvenissun]

Before even our distant ancestors had evolved the imagination to create all of the various religions, there was atheism.

I don't think it is true.
EVERY aboriginal tribes HAS a religion. So, the very first man must be a theist.

 

[fat wee robin]

What can I say. The answers here were a bit disappointing to be sincere. I will tell my opinion on why atheism exists, and I hope I will explain myself fine because I think it's toph.

I want to start from the beginning, with philosohpy, because in order to understand the post-modern minds we have to understand the forces that shaped the Western civilization and that, in my opinion, caused atheism. Let's start, as I said, with philosohpy, and with someone that is appreciated in my religion, Plato.

For the ancient greek philosophers and especially for Plato, there is a form of cognition that is non-discursive, that means that it does not take place in lenguage. Most people are familiar with Plato's dividing line from "The Republic" where he makes a distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible or ideal world of ideas, then he divides the intelligible world into two parts.

For him, there is a higher form of cognition than mathematic reason or dialectic, this is the direct, unmediated, vision of "the good" or "the beautiful". This ultimate contemplation, or "theoria" of "the good" or "the beautiful" is the end of dialectics, but it is not something we can produce or practice as we can practice dialectics. This ultimate "theoria" comes, we can only be ready for it. We can only prepare for it, because this "theoria" is beyond our knowledge and is external from us.

This approach will be developed by the later platonists, missnamed "neo-platonists" such as Plotinus and Proclus and a deep religious outlook is formed, one that will have a titanic impact on Orthodox spirituality. While the platonists had no concept of God as a personal being and certainly no concept of creation ex-nihilo, but they believed in the ultimate transcendence of the good and the fact that it relies beyond speech and beyond dialectics and discursive reason as well as beyond sensory experience provided a way for Origen and Evagrius to express their belief in the transcendent God of the hebrews revealed in the person of Christ in the cultural idiom of their own day.

While this thought was charged with some dangers and Origen's ideas was proof enough of that it cannot be denied that when combined with a pshychological insight and exercises borrowed from the stoics provided the neptic Fathers with powerful conceptions and tools for explicating the Orthodox path to the knowledge of God.

At some point, the patristic vocabulary became standardized and the word "nous" started to referr exclusively or almost exclusively to this higher, non discursive faculty of cognition. "Theonia" came to referr exclusively to the lower, discursive faculty of cognition, and this usage, in fact, goes all the way back to Plato. This standardization stands with the fact that it corresponds with real, lived experiences in the lifes of the Fathers.

Thus, the Fathers speak of the purification of the heart of the soul, the "nous" and its descent into the deep heart of men as the necessary precondition of the inmediated encounter with Christ, indwelling through the Holy Spirit.

At some point, however, and here comes the origins of atheism, in my opinion, this form of higher cognition dissappeared completely in the Western culture, and so the possibility of knowing God by purificating yourself in order to become intuitively aware of Him.

Some Orthodox theologians as Fr. John Rommanides are to put the blame for this at the shoulders of Saint Augustine, but this would be quite unfair for the bishop of Hippo. Most recently, some roman-catholics theologians have pointed to Duns Scotus as the cause for this. Despite who is right and the truth relies somewhere in the middle, by the dawn of the modern era in the Western civilization only two forms of cognition existed: the impression or through the discursive reason. With the arise of the scientific method, combining these two a new form was created and it remains until this day as the dominant intellectual paradigm of modernity: scientific rationalism. And yet, in spite of its appearences, philosophicly speaking it's a failure. David Hume knew that it was a failure when he wrote his inquiry concerning human understanding. He began his book by asserting that when we think we think about two kinds of things: matters of fact (sensed data) and relations of ideas and the rest of his book lead him to discuss the problem that this kind of thought made.

The modern era is characterized by three distinct attitudes: first, that human beings are essentially individuals; second, that human reason—and this will later be expanded to include the scientific method—is autonomous; and third, that human reason is sufficient to answer our needful questions and solve our problems.

Let’s begin with this new-fangled belief that human beings are essentially individuals. Aristotle wrote, and more than once, that to be human is to be in community. In fact, he defines man as a political, that is, a social, animal. A man who deliberately absents himself from society is, according to Aristotle, either a god or an animal, that is, he is either above humanity or below it. The one thing he is not, however, is a human being. In fact, so strong was this belief among the Greeks that the Greek word for individual is actually “idiot.”

Now, this belief is shared by all pre-modern peoples, and even today by most non-European societies. The modern cult of the sovereign individual marching to the beat of his own drummer is a European invention. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who despised modernity for a number of other reasons, called the triumph of the individual the greatest flower of modernity.

We may wonder, then, what brought about this great shift. The introduction of nominalism into medieval philosophy certainly had something to do with it. Nominalism is the position that only individual things exist. General terms referring to abstractions such as “humanity” or “human nature” are just names. Thus, a nominalistic anthropology would aver that there is really no such thing as humanity, only individual people.

The emerging new physics may have also played a role. Thomas Hobbes thought of humans explicitly along the lines of discrete bodies in motion, that is, if the natural world is made up exclusively of discrete material bodies moving in space, then people can be defined in much the same way. Hobbes made this anthropological physics the basis of his famous political philosophy.

In addition, however, we should also consider the influence the loss of the concept of nous may have had. The noetic faculty is one of pure intuitive apprehension. Its vision of the beautiful and the good is direct and unmediated. The discursive reason, on the other hand, is object-oriented. It is directed either towards sense-data or towards its own internal structure. In either case, however, thought is mediated by symbols or language. It is not too difficult to see how this could lead to the idea that each person is an individual cognitive center. In religion, this leads to the idea that each person is an individual interpreter of the Scriptures.

As long as one assumes that the natural world that all of these individuals perceive is one and uniform and that reason itself is universal and uniform, all is well. Once, however, one begins to entertain doubts about the objectivity of the world or of the universality of reason, then the whole program begins to unravel. I call this unraveling "post-modernism".

By way of contrast, let me draw your attention to the writings of the Fathers, particularly the greatest of the 20th-century theologians, Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Whether discussing the life of his mentor, St. Silouan, or his own experiences, Archim. Sophrony tells us that when the nous has been purified and encounters God in pure prayer, the soul becomes consciously aware not only of the unity of mankind but of all creation. This leads to the shedding of bitter tears for the world. These tears are not the product of sentimentality or emotion, but are a divine gift enabling the one who prays to enter into Christ’s intercessory prayer for all of creation. Do you see how the Orthodox method of prayer, noetic prayer, even when practiced by a monk living alone in a remote cell, leads not to egoism and isolation but to a noetic unity with God and with all of mankind?

Merci beaucoup .