Hi, I’m John Green, and welcome to Crash Course Religions! So this one will be fun and not at all stressful. God is dead, and we’ve killed him.
At least according to 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was an atheist, meaning he didn’t believe in a deity. He was also a harsh critic of Christianity and religion in general.
But this wasn’t his way of bragging; it was an alarm bell. A warning that there may be some downsides to conceiving of a universe governed by physics, and not divine will. Without God, who will we look to for moral guidance?
The death of God could spell the end of European society! Of the whole world! And yet, the world has continued to spin.
So were rumors of God’s death an exaggeration? Maybe. But Nietzsche’s generation wasn’t the first to give up their belief in God, and certainly wouldn’t be the last, either.
Today we’ll talk about what it means to live in a world where more and more people do not believe in gods–and whether approaching those atheistic beliefs through the lens of religion can be informative. Which won’t make anyone mad. [THEME MUSIC] The word “atheism” comes from the Greek word atheos, meaning “without a God.
” And that’s pretty much what atheism is today: a lack of belief in a higher power. But the word's meaning, like the folks who identify with it, has changed over time. Like, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the word first gained traction in Europe, the Protestant Reformation was in full swing and people needed a new vocabulary to describe the splintering of religious beliefs that was happening.
The word “atheist” was originally coined as an insult, something few people would have identified with. English dictionaries from the 1600s defined atheism as a quote “damnable doctrine” and often included quotes meant to discourage people from becoming atheists. Which… I mean, I guess dictionaries have never been impartial?
But it didn’t stick. French philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot in the late 17th and early 18th centuries made the idea of non-belief a lot more mainstream and visible, even as they struggled with their own faiths personally. Similarly, some of the founders of the United States, while not technically atheists, were into deism, where they thought God technically existed, but after making the universe, he just left it alone – like a watchmaker, or like my personal hero Charles Alderton, who invented the perfect soda recipe Dr Pepper and then left it alone to take over the world.
Different deists were more or less prone to reject Christianity, with some interested in Christianity’s moral and ethical teachings while ignoring, like, the god stuff. Like, Thomas Jefferson, for instance, spent years privately cutting every reference to the supernatural out of a Bible, while pasting and moving around certain teachings on morals and ethics. Atheism really took off during the 19th century with the writings of folks like Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx.
While Darwin himself was neither here nor there on the existence of a god, his theories about human evolution were often seen as in opposition to the Christian creation story. And Darwin’s friend and fellow scientist Thomas Huxley even debated the highly regarded Bishop of Oxford on the topic, and essentially told the bishop, “I’d rather have an ape for a grandfather than a guy like you. ” While atheists are still often stereotyped as immoral or even dangerous, atheism itself continues to grow in popularity.
In 2024, studies showed that roughly 28 percent of Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated. Of course, all those unaffiliated folks aren’t necessarily atheists. Within this category, there’s a pretty big crew of agnostics, which comes from a word that means “without knowledge.
” Appropriately, agnostics say they simply don’t know whether there’s a god. Many think it’s impossible to prove or disprove God’s existence and that there’s no point in trying. Then you have your materialists who believe that everything that exists can be studied through science.
Which isn’t an outright denial of God’s existence, but a way of saying, if a god did exist, it would have to do so within the laws of physics. And plenty do identify as atheists. But even within atheism, we find variations in philosophy.
There’s explicit atheism, which asserts positively that no higher power exists, and implicit atheism, which is a passive lack of belief in a higher power. Oh, boy, I’m getting a call from… a blocked number, which I didn’t know was even possible… [Devil’s Advocate] Heyyyy broski don’t hang up. I just got a question, one that’s been bugging me.
That’s what you guys do here, right? You answer questions. [John] I mean, that doesn’t even begin to describe everything we do here at Crash Course, but sure, go ahead.
[Devil’s Advocate] Isn’t believing in God a better bet than not believing? Like, I mean, if the atheists are right, then believing in God doesn’t change anything. But if they’re wrong, we lose everything!
Wouldn’t it be easier just to hedge your bets and believe? [John] That’s actually a pretty popular philosophical argument called Pascal’s Wager. It’s the idea that belief in God is, like, the safer bet.
So, I’ll bite, which one do you have your money on? [Devil’s Advocate] Well, that’s a silly question. God, the Father.
Capital-G. The one from the Bible. [John] So, not the West African god Anansi?
Or maybe the Egyptian war goddess Neith? Don’t even get me started listing the literal millions of Hindu deities. And then, of course, there’s always the possibility that the one true god belongs to a religion that doesn’t even exist yet… [Devil’s Advocate] Right, but I don’t believe in any of those gods… Oh.
[John] What makes Zeus or Demeter untrue but your God the only Truth? [Devil’s Advocate] Listen man, I… uh, gotta make some calls. You know, I’m starting to think I might actually be getting through to him.
[phone buzzes] Ah, he, uh, sent me a picture of a butt with the caption, “this is you”. So that’s nice. But our friend the Devil’s Advocate has brought up a good point – just not the one he was trying to make.
Atheism, as we know it today, is often brought up in opposition to Christianity. But the idea itself is considerably older and more diverse than that comparison suggests. In many cultures throughout history, there have been groups who didn’t care if the gods and goddesses of their people were really real, and others who specifically didn’t believe in the popular deities of their day.
Up to twenty percent of people who identify as Christian aren’t sure they believe the God of the Bible is Really Real, and therefore might be classified as agnostic. And in other religious traditions, including Judaism, it’s even more common. Ancient India saw multiple schools within Hinduism that denied the existence of an eternal or personal god.
Buddhism was founded by a guy who didn’t have much use for deities. Jainism— a religion that was founded in the 5th century and influenced the nonviolent ideologies of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. —has no rules about believing in a higher power.
In many cases, though, these weren’t the atheists we’d think of today. Scholars often use the term “nontheism” instead of “atheism” for ancient traditions; these nontheists were simply concerned with questions other than “Does god exist? ” Cultures in ancient China, Greece, and Rome all had their nontheism cliques at various times.
In the last couple centuries though, especially in the United States, atheism has broadened into a way to critique religion, society, and politics–especially the places where society is shaped by religious traditions. The American writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved, criticized the hypocrisy of slave-owning Christians. He once wrote, “I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.
” Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage pointed out similar religious hypocrisy while fighting for the rights of women. And in the 21st century, we’ve seen the rise of a movement known as “New Atheism,” popularized by writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Other writers, like Ta-Nahesi Coates, have written about civil rights within the framework of a godless universe.
In “Between the World and Me,” Coates imagines no moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, a response to a famous line from Martin Luther King. Where Nietzsche warned about the death of God, and what it might mean for a moral society, the New Atheists have advocated explicitly for an ethical obligation to reject the idea of God— centered around the belief that we could solve a lot of our problems if we did away with religion entirely. The New Atheists have at times been labeled “dogmatic” and even “fundamentalist” in their belief that there’s no God.
Which has led some to wonder if atheism is also a religion. Now, I admitted in episode one that I don’t know what a religion is, which means we’re in dicey territory. And, as we’ve seen throughout this series, defining a religion can be a bit like trying to guess how many stars are in the sky.
Like you could say at least five or at least five million, and both answers would be right and wrong in their own way. But let’s pursue this question by looking at some common features associated with religions and seeing how they stack up in atheism. Obviously, the whole supernatural-higher-power-thing is out.
But religions also serve as a framework that help people organize, shape, and make sense of life. For some atheists, the critique of religion fits that bill. Deconstructing religion and religious power is a moral imperative and an organizing principle in their lives.
Of course, for lots of others, atheism isn’t a “framework for sense-making. ” We might also look for shared practices or gatherings. And there are non-religious communities, like the American Atheists and the Sunday Assembly, who gather for events and experiences kinda like churches, but who specifically don’t believe in god.
So shared practices are on the table, although only a tiny percentage of atheists attend such gatherings. And what about shared belief? Well, this one clearly varies too.
Just like we’ve discovered the incredible diversity in the beliefs within each religion, atheists share some beliefs and convictions and also have a lot of different priorities. So this one gets a solid maybe as well. Finally, there’s doubt.
Doubt is the foundation of atheism. And it might also be one of the most universal experiences humans share. We’ve all experienced doubt.
In ourselves, in the world, in each other. And yet we continue to believe in the possibility of a better world – despite our doubts. Atheism is just another way of contending with reality.
It can mean a strong commitment to a particular kind of ethical thinking and behavior, without the looming judgment of a god to enforce it. It can also mean simply having too much going on to think about religion, or believing that the only things that matter are the things we can measure scientifically. Atheism defies broad-brush-painting.
But perhaps the biggest hallmark of atheism is that it has always existed alongside theism. It’s not a reaction to, but a complement of, the religious frameworks that guide many lives. Whether it can be called a religion is up for debate.
I think it boils down to whether you see religion primarily as whatever lenses through which you consider moral imperatives and ultimate concerns–in which case atheism is perhaps at least for some a religion–or whether you see religion primarily as a way of seeking connection to and understanding of the less empirical parts of consciousness–in which case atheism is a rejection of religion, and best considered outside of it. And if you think I’m going to come to a firm conclusion here, you haven’t been watching the rest of this series. Next time, we’re talkin’ religious texts—who wrote them, who’s equipped to interpret them, and how they influence our lives.
I’ll see you then. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana and made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
