Challenge: How widespread can atheism become?

Starting at any POD, how widespread can atheism become throughout the world? What factors would remove religion from a society?
 
Epicureanism, founded in 307 BC, was by far the most successful form of deism in the ancient world, which naturally spawned many atheists. However, it remained somewhat marginal until rendered extinct by Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity in Late Antiquity. IOTL, Epicurus directly told his students and followers to avoid politics, which is possibly a reason why the philosophy died out. The best way to make it more prominent in the Greco-Roman world and Europe at large is to perhaps look to a more successful philosophy, such as Confucianism. Have Epicurus take a much more traditionalist approach, while retaining his original deist and proto-atheistic ideas about God(s). If emphasis is placed on ritual, it might just ironically keep the practice of paganism alive in Europe.
 
Wow uhh... what a doozy. I don't see this thread becoming controversial at all...</s>

1. Get rid of Abrahamic monotheism at the source: Religion as an institution is pretty inertial and hard to get rid of (I mean Hinduism has been around in one form or another for close to 4000 years). It stands to reason that since Christianity and Islam are the two biggest world religions, and they both stem from Judaism, so if you get rid of Judaism and/or early Christianity, you get rid of the two largest world religions from OTL. One POD I can think of would be for the early Christian gospels to never be officially written down, instead simply remaining as oral traditions. Then again, very few people back then were literate anyways, so I'm not sure that them not being written down would be that much of a factor. If you have the Romans be more thorough in their genocide of the Jews during the Great Jewish Revolt in the 60s and 70s CE (just wanna be clear that I'm not anti-semitic and genocide is always bad). The ancient Romans clearly had no qualms with genocide, as they regularly slaughtered, deported, or enslaved entire ethnic groups, so it's possible I suppose. But of course that wouldn't get rid of religion in general, just the three primary monotheistic religions that exist today. The POD might be 609 BCE where the revolt against the Neo-Assyrians fails, or some point in the 500s BCE where the Neo-Babylonian Empire lasts longer, and in either of those TLs Judaism may be eventually snuffed out. However Judaism, Christianity, or Islam would obviously be replaced ITTL by something, but the more vague and non-prosthelitizing pagan religions of the ancient near East may eventually fade into obscurity with whatever "Renaissance" or "Enlightenment" happens ITTL, leaving only atheism. Obviously there's nothing ITTL preventing other prosthelitizing religions from emerging and becoming dominant in the world. Of course, this TL would do nothing to address hinduism, buddhism, confucianism, or any other eastern religions, which would still be alive and well if the POD is as late as the 60s CE (or even the 500s BCE). I don't know enough about the religious history of Asia and Africa to comment meaningfully on any of those.

2. Evangelical atheism: You might could have a POD in the 1600s-1800s where any of the philosophers of the Enlightenment rationalize that "spreading atheism" is a moral good and atheism catches on as an ideological trend in the West. I have my doubts on that succeeding because Christianity and Islam are both prosthelitizing religions and would necessarily resist any such efforts very fiercely, and they would have been well-established for well over 1000 years by this point.

3. No religion from the beginning: Alternatively, you could have a POD millions of years in the past where humans evolve to become less prone to correlating natural phenomena with contrived ideas of gods, preventing religion from ever developing as a cultural phenomenon. Of course, there's no consensus on what factors actually cause religions to develop, so I can't give a singular POD for that, since the psychological foundation of religiosity isn't fully understood. Obviously I'm coming from a nonreligious POV, and not trying to offend any religious people on the site, so please don't take any of the above as a personal attack. Another possible source might be the Indo-Europeans never migrate anywhere, the butterflies from that might eliminate hinduism and the abrahamic faiths, leaving only premedieval paganism and maybe a less diverse set of eastern religions

4. 1984 happens and the government actively kills all religion: That one's pretty self-explanatory. Basically any totalitarian government takes over the world and achieves such complete control over language and thought that they're able to snuff out religion completely.

5. Just give it time: One last suggestion might be no POD at all. Irreligion is on the rise in the West and is presumably correlated with standard of living (some of the least religious countries are Japan, South Korea, Norway, and Sweden, all of which have a very high standard of living), so as human living conditions gradually rise all around the world, maybe we'll all become nonreligious eventually, we just haven't given all religions enough time to fizzle out yet. Maybe at the end of history, everyone will be wealthy and we'll understand the universe fully enough that religion becomes totally unnecessary as an explanatory phenomenon, I have my doubts though, religion is nothing if not stubborn.

One last thing, how the heck do you spell "prosthelitizing"? I know I'm spelling it wrong but I can't figure out the correct spelling for the life of me.
 
don’t want to overstate the point, but some forms of Buddhism are agnostic or atheistic. Maybe some some of these could make headway in a western country during a period of religious liberty, or at least relaxation from the usual persecution of different beliefs.
 
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don’t want to overstate the point, but some forms of Buddhism are agnostic or atheistic. Maybe some some of these could make headway in a western country during a period of religious liberty or relaxation from the usual persecution of different beliefs.

I was about to suggest that. A spiritual belief system can still be atheist, in the sense that it need not believe in one or more gods.

So wank Buddhism.
 
5. Just give it time: One last suggestion might be no POD at all. Irreligion is on the rise in the West and is presumably correlated with standard of living (some of the least religious countries are Japan, South Korea, Norway, and Sweden, all of which have a very high standard of living), so as human living conditions gradually rise all around the world, maybe we'll all become nonreligious eventually, we just haven't given all religions enough time to fizzle out yet. Maybe at the end of history, everyone will be wealthy and we'll understand the universe fully enough that religion becomes totally unnecessary as an explanatory phenomenon, I have my doubts though, religion is nothing if not stubborn.
This seems the most likely way tbh. Once the scientific method has taken hold it becomes much much harder to claim any particular religion as the one truth as its lesser claims get proven wrong. I think it was Asimov who noted religion was on the wane ever since religious buildings started adding lightning rods rather than rely on prayer.
So an earlier scientific method would increase the numbers of atheists relative yo OTL.

One last thing, how the heck do you spell "prosthelitizing"? I know I'm spelling it wrong but I can't figure out the correct spelling for the life of me.
"Proselytizing". Think "pro-silly-tizing" not "prosthetics" ;)
 
. . Once the scientific method has taken hold . .
I think it’s more likely in a place when two or more religions are bumping up against each other. Some people decide that neither of them have a lock on the truth.

But, the demise of religion is greatly exaggerated ! !

Look at what percentage of people today have at least a goodly amount of belief in religion and sometimes quite a lot of belief . . . . . 150+ years after Darwin published his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (independently discovered by Wallace!)
 
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I think it’s more likely in a place when two or more religions are bumping up against each other. Some people decide that neither of them have a lock on the truth.

But, the demise of religion is greatly exaggerated ! !

Look at what percentage of people today have at least a goodly amount of belief in religion and sometimes quite a lot of belief . . . . . 150+ years after Darwin published his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (independently discovered by Wallace!)
I know a fair few who'd argue evolution is not incompatible with religion.
This creationism phase is a late development from extremists feeling under siege.
 
No religion from the beginning

Impossible - religion is based in pattern recogition. The same wiring that helps us see tigers in the savannah helps us see faces in the clouds and divine action underlying random chance.

People, if left to their own devices, are gonna try to understand their reality through stories and narratives. Can't be helped.
 
. . This creationism phase is a late development from extremists feeling under siege.
okay, I can agree in part , but I think some people just believe in creation because their brains are geared up to understand the world that way,

I mean, no less a source than Richard Dawkins said, the human mind evolved in such a way that we have trouble understanding the theory of evolution! (we want to keep interjecting purpose into it, and I think we don’t really understand in our gut fully the time periods involved)

And Stephen Webb, the author of the very interesting

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

He finally came down on the side that a cell’s cytoskeleton (!) (!) (!) and human-like language are most likely to be the bottlenecks to the evolution of human-similar intelligence on another planet.

A cell’s cytoskeleton is the filaments and tubules and part of the step in the evolution from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells. But his belief is amazingly like a believer in ‘intelligent design’ focusing on how difficult it is for the hemoglobin molecule to evolve!

And Webb’s book really is an excellent book :)
 
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I mean, no less a source than Richard Dawkins said, the human mind evolved in such a way that we have trouble understanding the theory of evolution! (we want to keep interjecting purpose into it, and I think we don’t really understand in our gut fully the time periods involved)

:)

The human mind can fully comprehend only a certain scale.

For example, objects can be as small as a grain of sand or as large as a mountain. But protons are too small to be meaningful even if we know what they are and how they work. Likewise, Orion is an object that takes up path of the sky, even though in reality it would take a spaceship several millennia to go from one of its stars to another.

Same with scales of time. A year seems like a long time to us, but Jesus walked the earth for 33 years and we can read the Gospels in a few hours. We can read Kings and Chronicles in a couple of hours, and those books cover several human lifetimes. Even the history of a relatively young nation like the US is a very long period of time.

I'm not sure the evolution issue Dawkins described is the result of wanting it to have purpose - it's more the expectation that science is supposed to answer all questions. So if it can't explain dark matter or demonstrate exactly when and how single celled organisms became multicelled organisms, it's viewed as a weakness. Whereas religion is supposed to include a degree of the unknowable or incomprehensible. Thus people are more likely to be satisfied with not understanding where YHWH came from or how the Trinity is one God but three Persons.
 
This seems the most likely way tbh. Once the scientific method has taken hold it becomes much much harder to claim any particular religion as the one truth as its lesser claims get proven wrong. I think it was Asimov who noted religion was on the wane ever since religious buildings started adding lightning rods rather than rely on prayer.
So an earlier scientific method would increase the numbers of atheists relative yo OTL.

Science is a process for finding stuff out about the observable world. It certainly undermines claims that God (or gods) has anything to do with, say, lightning storms, but it makes no claims to either the spiritual (which can neither be observed nor experimented on), nor the moral. Science concerns itself with the physical.

As such, a supposed struggle between Science and Religion really is straw-manning on the part of both sides.
 
okay, I can agree in part , but I think some people just believe in creation because their brains are geared up to understand the world that way,

I mean, no less a source than Richard Dawkins said, the human mind evolved in such a way that we have trouble understanding the theory of evolution! (we want to keep interjecting purpose into it, and I think we don’t really understand in our gut fully the time periods involved)

And Stephen Webb, the author of the very interesting

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life

He finally came down on the side that a cell’s cytoskeleton (!) (!) (!) and human-like language are most likely to be the bottlenecks to the evolution of human-similar intelligence on another planet.

A cell’s cytoskeleton is the filaments and tubules and part of the step in the evolution from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells. But his belief is amazingly like a believer in ‘intelligent design’ focusing on how difficult it is for the hemoglobin molecule to evolve!

And Webb’s book really is an excellent book :)
Your examples don't really match your point. As Landmass Wave said it's understanding scale that's problematic. Disregarding evidence for evolution in favour of miraculous creation is more like conditioning, external programming, errors than a wiring problem.

Science is a process for finding stuff out about the observable world. It certainly undermines claims that God (or gods) has anything to do with, say, lightning storms, but it makes no claims to either the spiritual (which can neither be observed nor experimented on), nor the moral. Science concerns itself with the physical.

As such, a supposed struggle between Science and Religion really is straw-manning on the part of both sides.
If I gave that impression I apologise. My point was to highlight that Religion, the organisation and control of beliefs and faiths, often concerns itself with the areas that the scientific method, Science if you will, is better able to explain. It's only relegated to the spiritual when it's lost the battle for the physical.
I'd also disagree that morals are a purely spiritual matter when they are clearly a social one and as such can be explained without reference to spirituality.
 
Science is a process for finding stuff out about the observable world. It certainly undermines claims that God (or gods) has anything to do with, say, lightning storms, but it makes no claims to either the spiritual (which can neither be observed nor experimented on), nor the moral. Science concerns itself with the physical.

As such, a supposed struggle between Science and Religion really is straw-manning on the part of both sides.

I'd say that the struggle is real when people attempt to use religion to say that science is wrong, such as creationists and anti-vaxxers. If religion doesn't try to say that science is wrong, then the struggle is much reduced.
 
I'd say that the struggle is real when people attempt to use religion to say that science is wrong, such as creationists and anti-vaxxers. If religion doesn't try to say that science is wrong, then the struggle is much reduced.

Young Earth Creationists, obviously.

But there are secular progressives among the antivaxxer crowd.
 
Impossible - religion is based in pattern recogition. The same wiring that helps us see tigers in the savannah helps us see faces in the clouds and divine action underlying random chance.

People, if left to their own devices, are gonna try to understand their reality through stories and narratives. Can't be helped.
Well, Harvard Business School likes to use the case study method. And law school and medical school frequently use the case study method. Some people get a lot out of this approach, and some people don’t.

Just like if there’s a power point presentation which breaks down and categorizes the different types of bacteria which cause human disease, some people will get a whole lot out of this. And some people won’t.

I guess the point is . . . Yes, play to strength, go with your dominant intellectual style and get a lot out of it. At the same time, try to be a little bilingual or even trilingual, so to speak.
 
. . I'd also disagree that morals are a purely spiritual matter when they are clearly a social one and as such can be explained without reference to spirituality.
I think we might have some agreement. :) For I myself do not subscribe to the view that Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and all those other cool cats have absolutely nothing to contribute.

For example, the modern philosopher Derek Parfit apparently did not form normal visual memories and of course it affected his philosophy or at the very least the topics he dove into. Among other things, he advocated that we should be a damn sight more concerned about future generations, or we should not so heavily discount them just because we can’t focus on specific, known, visualizable people. And we shouldn’t be so afraid of death. Just like if I really, truly believed in reincarnation with total amnesia, I might be less afraid of death.

Parfit is hard to understand (to fellow AH members: hint, hint :) yes, I could use some help!)
 
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