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"Ancient history[edit]

Ancient Greece was a polytheistic society in which the gods were not omnipotent and required sacrifice and ritual.

The earliest beginnings of religious skepticism can be traced back to Xenophanes. He critiqued popular religion of his time, particularly false conceptions of the divine that are a byproduct of the human propensity to anthropomorphize deities. He took the scripture of his time to task for painting the gods in a negative light and promoted a more rational view of religion. He was very critical of religious people privileging their belief system over others without sound reason.[6][7]

Socrates' conception of the divine was that the gods were always benevolent, truthful, authoritative, and wise. Divinity was to operate within the standards of rationality.[8] This critique of established religion ultimately resulted in his trial for impiety and corruption as documented in The Apology. The historian Will Durant writes that Plato was "as skeptical of atheism as of any other dogma."[9][7]

Democritus was the father of materialism in the West, and there is no trace of a belief in any afterlife in his work. Specifically, in Those in Hades he refers to constituents of the soul as atoms that dissolve upon death.[10] This later inspired the philosopher Epicurus and the philosophy he founded, who held a materialist view and rejected any afterlife, while further claiming the gods were also uninterested in human affairs.[11] In the poem De rerum natura Lucretius proclaimed Epicurean philosophy, that the universe operates according to physical principles and guided by fortuna, or chance, instead of the Roman gods.["

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