Once upon a time, people believed that the world was flat and new, that God made everything in six manic days, but that for some inscrutable reason he was still easily angered and liked to throw lightning bolts around when he got in a bad mood. Into this sorry state of affairs, there emerged a thing called "science" which, in the teeth of opposition from ignorant, self-serving clerics, proved that none of the above was true. Gradually, wonderfully, the human race matured, every confident scientific step pushing our infantile notions and ideas of the divine closer to oblivion.
Unlike the one found in the beginning of Genesis, this creation myth is not particularly ancient but it has gained a faithful following in the last century or so. Unfortunately, although true enough to be believable, it is not true enough to be true. The history of atheism has a bit to do with science but rather more do with politics. Much the same can be said for its present and future.
France and Britain show how. Back in the 'Enlightenment', both countries had their sceptics. Indeed, Britain's were arguable more sceptical, with the great deists of the early 18th (John Toland, Thomas Woolston, Antony Collins, Matthew Tindal) paving the way for better known figures like Edward Gibbon and David Hume. It was France, however, that developed Europe's first tradition of public atheists, most of whom could be found enjoying the lavish hospitality of the man his friends dubbed the "personal enemy of God", Baron d'Holbach. By contrast, Britain did not develop a tradition of public atheism for another century and even then it wasn't a particularly intellectual affair.
The reason lay not in 'science' but in respective political settlements. Eighteenth century France was politically (and intellectually) asphyxiated - an absolute monarch backed by an absolute church which monitored, and often punished, all forms of religious and political dissent. Early scepticism found deep wells of political indignation on which to draw and transformed into full-fledged atheism.
The British, by contrast, were no less scientifically sophisticated than their Gallic neighbours but were notably more intellectually and politically tolerant, with - importantly - that tolerance being grounded and justified by the nation's Christianity. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton led the charge for scientific progress in the name of God, and John Locke for biblically-grounded toleration and political accountability. The result was that the swamps of bad political religion were, if not exactly drained, at least tamed.
America and Russia offer a similar, more modern story. Christianity was in the American bloodstream from the earliest days. Many clergy supported the revolution, thereby associating the faith with political emancipation in the way it was only partially in Britain, and not at all in France. A sense of Providentialism (difficult to sustain without some sense of the transcendent) was also an important player. Perhaps crucially, however, the new nation's Constitution and, in particular its first amendment, prevented the clergy from ever falling into the same error it did in Europe. American atheism never developed the same kind of deep, martyr-strewn, theo-political swamps that so fed atheism in the Old World.
Russia completes the quartet. Atheism's greatest public success came on the back of rigid, often brutal, political autocracy allied to rigid Christian Orthodoxy. While other European nations slowly liberalised through the 19th century, Russia did not, or least did so only very reluctantly and partially. The result was an explosion of impassioned godlessness in 1917, a triumph for atheism that turned, over the next few decades, into its greatest tragedy.
This analysis helps explain the recent spasm of anti-theism, usually known as New Atheism. The emergence of God as a political actor was not anticipated by the many who had bought into the secularisation thesis - the idea that as nations modernise they necessarily secularise. Wherever political religion emerged it upset the narrative, but in places where it emerged angrily or violently, it gave atheists something to get their teeth into. If this was religion, who needed it?
Of course, many of the religious agreed, but that was hardly the point. After decades in which Anglicanism (in England), chastened, politically quiescent evangelicalism (in America), and Vatican II flavoured Catholicism (everywhere) gave atheists precious little to get indignant about, the Religious Right, a more conservative-styled papacy under John Paul II, and violent political Islam - not movements that have much in common with one another - changed the debate. New Atheists got upset.
The eccentrically-religious philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote of "doubting and non-doubting behaviour", "there is only the first if there is the second." Atheism is not doubt (indeed some atheists seem to be less capable of doubt than the fundamentalists they criticise). But Wittgenstein's point stands. For political, rather than scientific reasons, we can expect to hear a lot more of atheism in the 21st century but only for the pleasingly paradoxical reason that God is back.
"Atheists: the Origin of the Species" is published by Bloomsbury.
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