Atheism before the Enlightenment with Michael Hunter and Patrick McGhee

Many people assume humanism began with the Enlightenment. But sceptical, rational, human-centred ideas have a much longer history. This episode travels back to the centuries before the so-called Age of Reason to meet the freethinkers, doubters, and proto-humanists who challenged religious orthodoxy when doing so could mean prison, exile, or death, and asks what their courage tells us about the slow erosion of religious certainty.

Guests:

• Professor Michael Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience. https://www.bbk.ac.uk/about-us/fellows/michael-hunter
• Dr Patrick McGhee, Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University. https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/patrick-mcghee

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

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Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

Transcript

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanists UK. I'm Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeleine Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history, uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life.

Why Britain's pre-Enlightenment doubters matter

Madeleine Goodall 0:37

Many people think that humanism began with the Enlightenment, with the great philosophers and reformers of the 18th centuries and beyond. But as we've been exploring in this podcast, skeptical, rational, and human-centered ideas have a much longer history. Ideas that were already circulating across Britain and beyond before the so-called Age of Reason. This week we're delving into these earlier origins, the free thinkers and proto-humanists of the centuries before the Enlightenment, individuals who challenged religious orthodoxy at a time when doing so could be extremely dangerous. Their questioning planted seeds of rationalism and scepticism that would go on to shape the Enlightenment and ultimately modern humanism. To discuss these ideas and more, we're delighted to be joined by Professor Michael Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment:, The English and Scottish Experience. And by Dr. Patrick McGhee, Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University, whose current research project explores the anatomy of atheism in the Atlantic world, circa 1600 to 1800. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Andrew Copson.

Where the evidence hides: legal records and inquiries

Andrew Copson 1:47

And together we'll be uncovering the early roots of humanism before the Enlightenment. So histories of humanism and non-religion do often emphasize the significance of the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason in helping to usher in the sort of personal freedoms and intellectual patterns that we recognise as being humanist. But as we're increasingly finding out from research like that of our guests, there are doubters, free thinkers, and atheists who came before. And what Maddy and I have been seeing as we've been reading the literature ourselves ready for this episode is the difference between the open irreligion of some people, obviously during a period of great risk, and the more difficult to discern in the historical record, but in some ways more interesting, private doubts of ordinary people. So today we're talking to two people who have given us a greater understanding of this, about the history and development of those ideas. And uh we'll talk at the end about uh how those ideas are still relevant today to atheists and humanists. Michael, I want to start with you because your book that Maddie mentioned, Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment, uncovers some of the evidence for irreligious opinion before the Enlightenment, from passing mentions in the record to a smaller number of better documented cases that you can discuss at length. Before we get into the detail, where do you find the evidence for non-believers and irreligious people in this period? Because it doesn't jump out from the primary sources, at least to many people. You have to really go looking for it.

Michael Hunter 3:22

No, I mean the the the fact of the matter is it's very frustrating because it one is told by orthodox apologists how prevalent atheism is and how the whole cities are full full of atheists. And yet when you actually try to scrutinize and find examples, it's it becomes very difficult. Everyone suddenly disappears. This is partly, of course, because probably not much of it was recorded at the time, not much mostly it was orally expressed and not written down. But there are these just these very occasional cases which you come across, which I came across, which I wrote up in my book, literally just three in the entire period before 1750, where you could actually collect a huge amount of evidence from a variety of archival sources, and it's just through that meticulous attention to detail that I was able to come up with this profile of just these very, very few examples of people who had the misfortune to come to the attention of the authorities.

Andrew Copson 4:19

And that's where the sources are, really. It comes from official records of people whose opinions were documented because essentially they were in the firing line.

Archibald Pitcairn and the eternal world

Michael Hunter 4:27

Two of the three cases that I have are from actual legal records, and you have detailed depositions taken down and uh interrogations and all of that sort of thing. The third one is actually just a very well, there were rumors of the heterodoxy of Archibald Pitcairn at the time, which I d discussed in the course of my study. But basically he wrote a fully atheistic tract, which and there's no real parallel to it. Because it is quite overtly atheistic and very convincing, arguing for an eternalist world and all of those other details in a way that it it's almost striking to find. And very and and it's very arrogant and and and assertive in doing so.

Andrew Copson 5:14

Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about him, and we'll think about a little bit more about the ideas that he expresses. So um tell us tell us about Dr. Pitcairn. Who was he?

Michael Hunter 5:23

Dr. Pitcairn was a controversial figure. He was a strong Episcopalian. He may or may not have been an actual atheist. His dialogue may have been intended to illustrate what an atheist might say rather than to express views of his own. But nevertheless, it's astonishing that he came up with such a full and articulate exposition of such views. And it it is quite philosophically technical, the parts of the dialogue dealing with issues to do with body and spirit and their mutual relationship and therefore potential or existence of God or non-existence of God. It then goes goes into a lengthy section about whether the world is eternal, and he believes, and I think he's right in a way, that um the idea that the world is eternal makes much better sense of the what we see around us than the idea of an act of creation by some great deity. And he also deals with various subsidiary arguments, sort of progressivist ideas, which he argues for a much more sort of catastrophist view of human existence, with periods of great prosperity and intellectual integrity being punctuated by periods of barbarism. Anyway, but that gets into a more technical detail. But the main thrust of it is the argument for eternalism and for the simple non-existence of God, the unnecessarily nature of God.

Andrew Copson 6:38

And it is a very sophisticated text, and it does remind you of pre-echoes of the even more sophisticated texts that come later. But does it indicate in any way that he was part of a bigger world of conversation ideas which is unrecorded? Or is it one man's work working out his ideas in response to perhaps his religious ideas and the religious environment he finds himself in? Or does it do you think it does it tantalizingly give the indication that there's a whole world of discussion about these topics that isn't in the record? Because that's the question that came to me. I thought, can this can he have reasoned this through on his own? Or at least could have must have chatted to colleagues or others, and doesn't that indicate some richer uh world of ideas around the atheist and humanist space than perhaps we're aware of in the record?

Michael Hunter 7:22

Well, he does cite the English deist John Toland and makes good use of his ideas. But no, I didn't actually try to investigate whether it seemed as if he shared his ideas with his circle. Well, he almost certainly did expound his ideas to his colleagues, but no one else seems to have followed him in coming up with any anything like a similar formulation. And I rather got the impression that the other my other examples of atheists were were somewhat isolated figures who everyone was entertained and slightly shocked by, but that they were sort of loners, really. That that's very much the impression I formed. For instance, Thomas Aikenhead, who who we'll come to no doubt shortly. I had the impression that there was an element of sharing, but mostly people were slightly shocked by his ideas and slightly wanted to distance themselves from them.

Andrew Copson 8:09

I think we will come back to his case shortly. But before we do, uh can I ask a last question about the sources and the challenges that they present? And I can really I can absolutely uh understand why he said at the beginning that it was so frustrating trying to find, you know, uh more and wanting more, because even in the uh in the first part of your book, when there are some casual mentions of people's beliefs, you know, that almost just like this is it investigation in the late 16th century that turns up a few opinions, you're really hungry for more just seeing these ideas. It starts you to think, um, you know, well, where did they get that idea from? There's the right at the beginning of your book, in fact, you mentioned some of the inquiries that that were made into this, you know, the possibility the fear that there was rampant atheism, which as you say turned out often not to be the case. But in that you you do find one or two claims about what people are saying that make you think, oh, that's so interesting. And I wish I knew more, I wish I knew more about the society in which those people are existing. That means there are they can say such things, that they can express such doubts. And really, I suppose that is impossible to uncover that that sort of general lay, any general lay views that didn't meet with the attention of the authorities. And that must be something that is really irrecoverable. There are no other sources for it.

Michael Hunter 9:26

I mean, it it does make that Cernambus inquiry really extraordinary. It implies that if someone had in executed a forensics at study like that at any point in early modern England or Scotland, they might well have come up with a similar range of slightly iffy uh statements which looked a little bit suspicious but really didn't amount to much. And uh that that's my impression. We just it's just an extraordinarily fortunate survival, and that's about all one can say about it. But it implies that a kind of casual degree of irreligion was just commonplace in the period, but was normally orally expressed. And normally just people complained about it and worried about it, but couldn't do anything about it because there was nothing really very dangerous about it.

Why atheism terrified authorities

Andrew Copson 10:10

Yeah, that was the great take home for me from this book that there was just a casual amount of irreligion expressed in people's lives just as part of the baseline of society.

Madeleine Goodall 10:19

I was just about to say that, and maybe it's an incredibly basic thing to ask, but I'm just thinking for people who really know kind of nothing about the period that we're talking about. Why was there such a fear of atheism or the idea of irreligion? What was the horror of it? Could be a question for either of you.

Patrick McGhee 10:37

As Michael says, that there is this distinction between overt, overtly expressed, overtly shared, quite confident, even arrogant atheism. And then there are these much more subtle, quieter doubts, questions, conversational moments that may have been shared. But in terms of the fear of atheism, I think a lot of scholarship has emphasized the ways in which atheism was sometimes an expression of a deep-seated fear about all sorts of religious, social, and political moments of disorder, instability, even maybe crisis in various ways. That's something that Leif Dixon has talked about. And so in this period, which for the 16th and 17th centuries, being this period in the wake of the Reformation, this seismic religious sense of division, the question of what belief itself really means is highly contentious in this period. That's something that Ethan Shagan has written a lot about. But in that climate, in that atmosphere, the fear of somebody not only questioning aspects of religious practice or aspects of doctrine, but questioning that more fundamental conviction that God exists and that he intervenes and that organized religion is the answer and the authority. That just doesn't just have spiritual implications. It has really practical, real-world implications for the way people organize their lives and also, as I investigate, implications for themselves. It has implications within one's own identity and within what one's own body. So that would be my tentative hypothesis for why atheism is so feared in this period specifically. But of course, that is a wider history as well of people fearing dissenting opinions and heterodoxies of all kinds throughout the period.

Heathenism, doubt, and the body

Madeleine Goodall 12:19

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's really fascinating, and I would say a very concise illustrative response to that question. But because certainly, obviously, later on in the early 19th century, for example, you're seeing the fears post-revolutions in France and in America and all of the subsequent crackdown on expressions of free thought and the radical press and things like that. So I think there is a really interesting kind of thread there that it is fascinating to know where those earlier things come from. So, do you want to tell us a bit more about the work that you have done? I mean, your doctoral work and the work that you're doing now in terms of how it fits into this history.

Patrick McGhee 13:03

Sure. So I suppose the two major strands would be atheism and heathenism. My my interest in both of those topics reflects this underlying concern about religious difference, ways in which people have made sense of those who do not conform one way or another to Christianity in this case. Very briefly, my work on heathenism focuses on colonial America and English settlers trying to convert people they perceived as heathen, non-believers, idolatrous, nature worshippers, to the correct true religion. And the argument of that was that was a way for them to confront their own spiritual uncertainties. And that kind of led me on to thinking more closely about how people in England and in America, Protestant settlers mainly, reflected on their own doubts, their own uncertainties in a particularly fraught physical and spiritual environment. It was, as I've just said, the divisions in England were profound. Religious change was happening at an alarming pace. Add to that the experience of trying to secure a foothold in this harsh, new, unknown environment. That's a recipe, I think, for all kinds of doubts about one's purpose, about why the cosmos is unfolding the way it is, and how one should make sense of one's place in that world. And so that led me to look at how people experienced what they described as atheism or unbelief. And we can talk about the distinctions and the relationship between those words in more detail, not only in the people they saw around them, but also within themselves. And so that's the focus of my current research on the anatomy of atheism.

Madeleine Goodall 14:43

And where do you find the kind of the evidence for that, that kind of doubt, whether it's public or indeed very personal?

Religious doubt versus avowed atheism

Patrick McGhee 14:52

Sure, yeah. So as Michael said, he's absolutely right that most of the evidence we have for the way people thought about perceived, experienced atheism comes from official sources, prescriptive sources. And I think there's a wide range of different sources available that kind of give us some sorts of glimpse into that. So my research focuses on pastoral literature, that's printed sermons and some manuscript sermons, some correspondence between ministers and correspondence that ministers kept and manuscripts that they wrote on their own sermons, but also medical texts, treatises about how to treat spiritual affliction, how to deal with the kind of symbiotic relationship between physical and uh spiritual anxiety that people experienced. So there's all sorts of prescriptive literature that gives us some insight into how medical practitioners and theorists, and also Protestant ministers, felt they could help readers with that problem of spiritual uncertainty. And then there are one or two self-written autobiographical accounts from ministers actually, who write about their own struggle to come to terms with the theology that they are preaching at the pulpit. So there are there is some private evidence, but again, I think that does come back to this question of how you define what they mean by words like atheism and unbelief. And that's uh one of the one of the pivotal things that that needs to be discussed, I think.

Andrew Copson 16:15

Would it be fair to say, Patrick, that when you're in your work, you're mainly encountering religious doubts rather than the confident expression of irreligious views?

Patrick McGhee 16:24

I think in many cases that that's fair to say, although one of the big questions that I uh I think all historians ask is how would contemporaries have interpreted those phrases and would they have recognized that idea in the way that we do? In the examples I look at, people like, just to give some specific examples, Samuel Rogers was a Puritan minister in Cambridge and England, writing a diary in the 1630s. Thomas Sheperd was a prominent minister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he wrote about a diary in the 1640s, in the 1630s and 40s. Those works, when they talk about their own spiritual struggle, the word doubt is less pivotal to them than the word unbelief and the word atheism. And it's fascinating to read the ways in which they use those terms compared to the ways in which it's used polemically to discredit dangerous dissenting colonists who were undermining the new settlements in New England and Virginia. And because for ministers like Samuel Rogers, who wrote about his own unbelief, for him it was an almost sensory bodily experience. It was an affliction that he would overcome almost sometimes on a daily or weekly basis. He would have these profound moments of darkness, as he described it, blindness, he called it, a kind of spiritual blindness that would that he would describe as unbelief. And then he would implore God to come back and help him. And in that sense, it is a form of spiritual doubt, insofar as, as I said before, this is a period where what it means to believe is changing. And unbelief is almost more to do with the absence of faith, the difficulty of discerning faith in the Protestant theology, the challenge to try and discern faith, become closer to God, find evidence of salvation and assurance. But nonetheless, it leads to these profound moments of doubt about whether that's possible and about whether God is with you. And just very briefly on Thomas Sheperd, it gets very complicated because he writes in his diary about experiencing atheism and unbelief in the same sentence. But he's still referring to this sense of difficult, almost bodily challenge to try and find faith correctly. And he writes about the secret wound of atheism and unbelief that he is experiencing. So it's this visceral sensory problem that they're trying to solve using these very striking, seemingly decisive terms, but within a theological context.

What makes this period pivotal?

Michael Hunter 19:02

And a huge amount of effort is devoted to that, largely as a way of shocking people into rejecting it. And of course, the experiences that Patrick is describing, they work in a very interestingly sort of ambivalent way, because on the one hand, you have these doubts, which you privately ingest, and yet you oscillate between having the doubts and returning to your true faith and being really comforted by it. And I can see the power of that in in the context of Christian devotion. Without in any way wanting to minimize the significance of these private doubts, they uh are extremely useful in an in an emotional way as a means of just encouraging you to reinforce your faith. But what I've felt about this is that, and I feel that there's been some misunderstanding of this, particularly by Alec Ryrie in his recent book, Unbelievers, which conflates unbelief and atheism with doubt. That I think that it is important to distinguish between people like Pitcairn and Aikenhead, who were, or indeed Christopher Marlowe or various others who were dealt with more briefly in my book, who are true atheists, who actually proselytize on behalf of the creed, if you like, of atheism, and these private doubters who kept it completely to themselves. Robert Boyle, the scientist, on whom I've done a huge amount of work, is plagued by private doubts, but no one at the time ever knew it. You know, this was a completely private world. And even when people admit it, as Bunyan, John Bunyan does in Grace Abounding, he admits it as a in retrospect as a way of sort of establishing his credentials as a great advocate of faith. By definition, believers' doubt, I think, differs from true atheism. But I just say that with without in any way detracting from the significance of doubt as a phenomenon in its own right. I think it's just we need to be not to avoid confusion on that point.

Andrew Copson 20:57

Is this one of the things that makes this period before the enlightenment of interest, really? Because it seems there is this whole inner world and then there are the ideas outside, and there's the conflict, and there's people writing diaries and so on. What are the what sort of moment is this in the longer history of do you think? I this is a question for both of you, really. What makes this period to you? You've dedicated a lot of your time to studying it. What makes this period particularly of interest? Is it this interaction between the public and private? Is it that it's a a pivotal moment in some way? What how how has it come to appeal to you?

Michael Hunter 21:29

Thinking about it as pre-Enlightenment. It is often thought that the Enlightenment provided tools for atheism which had not previously existed, that in enabling people to conceive really difficult ideas of a world without God, which had been precluded by uh earlier intellectual traditions. But what interested me looking back from in fact, one or two of the reviewers of my book pointed out that to a large extent my my my atheists are early Enlightenment atheists as As much as pre-Enlightenment ones. But when I thought about that criticism, I went back to the study of the earlier period that I initially wrote back in the 1980s and have reprinted in and republished in the book. And I'm astonished at how articulate in their atheism people were long before the Enlightenment. People like Marlowe is the chief example because, again, of official inquiries, in his case, the investigations of the authorities, which led to the so-called Baines note, which retails his heterodox views. But also complete non-entities who just who openly denied, accused Christ of being imposter or denied the resurrection and the immortality of the soul and all that. It seems as if it's something almost spontaneous that goes right back through the Tudor period and probably into the Middle Ages as well. But obviously it's all very haphazard, the F evidence of it that comes to life. But I was struck by how it almost seems as if it's something that people can't help thinking of, just occasionally in in their own right.

Madeleine Goodall 23:02

I was just thinking, having read some things about the kind of evidence for this in the Middle Ages and the particularly in heresy trials, and again in in records that are to do with legal enforcement and things like that, where there are often the people are expressing these ideas that and actually it's interesting in the context of Patrick's work in terms of that kind of anatomy or that physical idea, people questioning, well, if we're all eating the body of Christ every time we have the host, how hasn't it run out yet? Or what happens when it comes out the other end? You know, all of these very physical, very visual, and also quite kind of commonsensical ideas about this that again you suspect are probably being circulated, joked about, talked about by the average person, but find, you know, relatively few perhaps formal records that we can look back at, but show this evidence that this was there and that people were having these thoughts and were expressing them. And as you say, Michael, that those tools of expressing this, of thinking these things through were there before we imagined that the Enlightenment kind of produced or enabled them. It's just fascinating, isn't it?

Reformation upheaval across Britain and Europe

Patrick McGhee 24:17

If I may just add to just an additional point, Michael and I have discussed this in several contexts, and I agree that I think it's crucial to separate the private Christian doubts, if you like, of religious believers from these self-avowed thinkers making these interventions quite provocatively. And there are obviously distinctions between those, and I think those are very important. I would add though that I think there is one of the to answer Andrew's question about why this period, why I'm so preoccupied with this period, for me is it's it's also about the bridges between this earlier Reformation culture and the emergence of what we might call the proto-Enthumment, the kind of early Enlightenment. And one of the ways you can see that bridge emerges through the ways in which religious, the most intensely religious writers talk about things like atheism and unbelief, both privately and publicly. And I think that's why the body has become such a preoccupation for me, because it's something that you see not only in the autobiographical writings and the notes for sermons that ministers were writing about, how um the devil infiltrates the body with fiery darts that produce atheistic thoughts, for example. That's an argument that Cotton Mather put about in his sermons. He's a he was a late 17th, early 18th century minister. But he took those ideas and you can see them shaping his interventions in all sorts of religious and kind of medicinal scientific things. Cotton Mather was one of the biggest proponents of conviction in the Salem witch trials, and he was one of the earliest proponents of inoculation as a medical solution. So that that that's a bridging figure between two complete things now that we would consider incongruous. He kind of saw as similar as related answers to the same underlying problem, which is how do you discern the hand of God in the body in the world? How do you ensure that there's this physical and spiritual solution? And atheism was a part of that. And the only other thing I would add is that if you're a religious believer or a minister and you genuinely do start to experience this almost palpable physical sense of doubt and unbelief and atheism, whatever you want to call it, I think that does shape how you perceive and perhaps even interact with people in the real world who you perceive to be atheists. And again, coming back to the body, if you can make something physical, if you can attach an idea like atheism to a physical affliction or explain it physically, I think there is an argument to the B-pad about the extent to which that makes it easier for religious authorities to control it and to diagnose it and to recommend solutions that can often be quite interventionists. And I think the extent to which the religious and political authorities of the day were able to assert authority over the body, I think comes down to a lot of the ways in which they were trying to prescribe order, prescribe stability. And one of the ways I think they do that is by trying to describe atheism as a partly physical condition. So I completely I'm not disagreeing with Michael at all. I agree that those things are different, but I think there are these interesting bridging points. And I think the body is one of the areas you can see that kind of unfold. And I think there is an emotional dynamic to that and a sensory dynamic, but we can talk about that separately perhaps.

Andrew Copson 27:24

That does make it a particularly fascinating period, doesn't it? It might be worth at this point to clarify for the listener what period we're talking about. So in terms that people might be used to, we're talking here about what you might call the sort of late Tudor period in in England up to the early Georgian period. So what do we say from the late 1500s to the early 1700s? Is that right?

Michael Hunter 27:45

Yes, most importantly, it's the period after the Reformation. And clearly that is an absolutely fundamental change that placed completely new burdens on people in terms of belief, in terms of having to choose basically between Catholicism and Protestantism, which meant that you just couldn't take faith for granted in the way that you had been able to in the Middle Ages. There have been isolated sceptics, lollards, etc. in the Middle Ages who had questioned religious belief. But there's no real sort of division of the basic structure of religion, that fundamentally religion is a single whole. Whereas suddenly, from the early 16th century, the whole thing is split in two, and with with this vituperative debate between the protagonists of each side against the other, which in a way is very destabilizing, and I think it creates a completely new environment of thought which people have to come to terms with. And in a way, the fear of atheism is part of that, isn't it? The idea that you might relate to religion altogether is almost a natural corollary of having to choose between competing faiths.

Andrew Copson 28:46

And this is a this is obviously a podcast primarily about Britain, but I suppose i if the Reformation is the stimulus for, as it were, non-religious beliefs being an option, then this is something that's taking place all over Europe. We know from think of a priest like the priest Meslier in France who's keeping a private diary in the late 1600s in which he's making all sorts of anti-Christian statements, quite well-reasoned statements, a mixture of quite well-reasoned statements about how there's no God, and then a mixture of really vituprative sort of anger, and which you can understand, because he's having to keep all of this secret, otherwise he would be in a lot of trouble. He's writing at that same sort of time. Of course, there's the there's I think there's a text from Poland, isn't there, about a non-existence of God around this sort of time. This is something that ha is happening everywhere that is influenced by the Reformation, where non-religion is becoming an option. Is that right? Britain's part of that wider moment.

Favourite freethinkers: Thomas Aikenhead

Michael Hunter 29:39

Yeah. I mean, there's famous the there's the case stated, sorry, by Carlo Ginzburg of Menocchio, the Italian Miller who devised this incompletely irreligious cosmology and is prosecuted by the church authorities. Again, another case is that of Lucilio Vanini, who burned the heretic in Toulouse in 1619. And these people surface occasionally all over the place. And yeah, there's certainly nothing uniquely English about it. No.

Andrew Copson 30:09

During this long period, there are obviously a number of individual figures that might appeal to casual readers, but also to academics. And I wonder if either of you, either of you can answer, but have a particular favourite. Maggie and I like to think about our favourite atheists and humanists from each period. We've got our favourites, but I wonder if either of you have. And if you don't want to talk about favourites, then you could talk about an interesting person that people might not have heard about, for example. I like Aikenhead, Michael. I don't know if you want to tell us more about Aikenhead. Maybe he's not your favourite.

Michael Hunter 30:40

The person who has fascinated me, and in a way, is at the core of my research on atheism, is this unfortunate chap, Thomas Aikenhead, who was actually hanged as an atheist in Edinburgh in 1697. This is a really shocking idea that someone who just was an ingenious student who came up with these very clever and searching critiques of Christianity should actually be actually taken to the gallows for his pains. And it actually is it does make one my study goes into great detail about whether the extent to which he might have repented, I would have repented if I was threatened by hanging. And yet with an element of defiance about it too. One thing I do find extraordinary about these atheists is why they dared to do it, because it was so dangerous. It's a slightly baffling element of the whole s sort story that Akenhead, luckily, apart from Vanini and one or two others, but Akenhead was unusual in actually receiving the death penalty. Other people were treated more leniently, but nevertheless were s subject to real humiliation and degradation for their opinions, and yet they actually were nevertheless obstinate in putting them forward. And it's an extraordinary phenomenon actually, and really, I think, really revealing to us in retrospect. I believe that in the case of Aikenhead, there was a petition that he he should be commemorated by a statue in Edinburgh in about 2000, which received only about 18 signatures, so it didn't get anywhere. But there is a statue to um Vanini in the south of Italy, which you can look at on Google, which maybe should be an example of what could be done in Edinburgh for the sake of Aikenhead. In fact, not so much with Meslier, but the other sort of atheist martyr in 18th century France is the Chevalier de la Barre, who was inspired by Voltaire and was actually executed. And France being a more anti-clerical country than England, there are two monuments to la Barre, one in the centre of Paris. And really, we should maybe emulate that in this country.

Andrew Copson 32:42

Coming back to Aikenhead specifically, because he is such an interesting figure, and if he's your favourite, we should talk about him a little bit more. How did he come? What is his story? How did he come to hold and then to express the views that he had?

Michael Hunter 32:55

He was actually a student at the University of Edinburgh. And the extraordinary thing is that the University of Edinburgh was buying all these dangerous books, and so he was actually being fed books that gave him heterodox ideas by people like the biblical critic Richard Simon or Thomas Hobbes or Spinoza and others. And he was offered this sort of potpourri of dangerous ideas, which I think students were offered as a means encouraging them to know how to refute them. But obviously, it was equally possible for them to ingest them and become fluent in them, as Aikenhead did. And the other thing that I thought was interesting about Akenhead is that clearly a lot of what he said was very offensive, just not quite as offensive as Marlowe, who was, who claimed Christ was illegitimate and homosexual, etc. But basically Akenhead goes quite far down that route and is also quite witty. So he describes the Bible as Ezra's fables on the grounds that Ezra, who was an Old Testament scribe, invented the stories and that they weren't really real at all. And he he also makes jokes like that. But there's a spectrum then in his ideas between this almost sort of jokey ridiculing of religion with a really serious streak in which he comes forward with ideas about the world being eternal and other such ideas, which were part of the fundamental essence of an anti-Christian religion position, which Pitcairn and others develop more fully. So what that was what interested me about the Aikenhead case about was this spectrum between almost ribaldry on one on the one hand and very serious thought on the other. And it helps to make sense of the perception of atheism on the part of the orthodox attackers of it, who are constantly worried about this sort of w wittiness and ribaldry in the attack on Christianity, but also realize that it's deep it's ligged with a deep deep doubting, which is much more dangerous.

Andrew Copson 34:51

And confident, a confident expression of the thing.

The man who denied God in colonial Jamestown

Michael Hunter 34:54

Yes, and that's the other thing that struck me is this real I've used this word assurance, and it's a Christian term, but it fits these atheists so perfectly because they're just so assured, they just know they're right. It's extraordinary.

Madeleine Goodall 35:06

So, Patrick, who is your favourite figure, or is there somebody who particularly has drawn you?

Patrick McGhee 35:13

I think there's a story that I that has become a favourite, although it's uh it's not a particularly uh pleasant story, but it's uh it's a powerful example of the ways in which religious writers were willing to share stories of seemingly real, tangible atheism in order to further their own messaging to their congregants, to their neighbors and friends. And then it's the story of a settler in colonial Virginia. And one of the reasons it's important is because these kinds of stories were shared in England and in the colonies to try and explain to people how important and how difficult the colonial project was. And it's the story of a man named Hugh Price or Preese. It's difficult, we don't know a lot about him, but it was included in a colonial report sent back to England to explain how things were going in the wake of a very harsh, famously, infamously harsh winter in uh 1609 to 10 in colonial Jamestown. And very briefly, the story is that the hunger was so terrible and the weather was awful that people were struggling to find food, people were struggling to support themselves. And one man, in an act of desperation and surrender, walked out into the market square at Jamestown and declared that there was no God and that God, if God existed, he would never have allowed such a terrible situation to have unfolded. And um, the story that was reported goes that after this had happened, it was his sheer hunger that had led this to happen, that led him to just express this kind of denial of God's existence. He then apparently, with a friend, wanders into the woods in search of food where he's attacked and killed by wolves, and then his body is neglected and not eaten. So there's an ironic kind of parable quality to this tale. And I think it also involves an attack from indigenous people and it wraps up the entire kind of experience. And one of the lessons that's drawn from this story, this report, is that the hand of God intervened to find a fitting end for somebody who attributed their hunger to the absence of God rather than observe all the theological and practical things that we've taught about, deferring to God trying to figure out a spiritual meaning to these things. So there's a cautionary tale embedded in this story. But crucially, it's a story that begins with a very clear, emphatic example of somebody who reportedly was willing to deny the existence of God, not out of some philosophical or intellectual interest, but out of physical hunger. And I think that's it, that again speaks to this kind of maybe some blurring of the lines between these different manifestations of non-belief. So I wouldn't say I'm not necessarily saying that's my favourite atheist, but it's one of the most striking stories of atheism that I've come across.

Andrew Copson 37:57

It does illustrate, doesn't it, how all the elements that lead to doubt and unbelief are present pretty much everywhere. That's the problem of evil, really, that man. Yes, motivated by his own personal hunger, but really what he's saying is this if this were true, this wouldn't be allowed, this wouldn't happen.

Patrick McGhee 38:11

So I just even if that's a religious story from a religious source prescribed to dissuade people from atheism, it it nonetheless, as Michael said, it has this awareness of a really complex philosophical point, really, is willing to share that and promulgate that quite widely to make a religious point.

The slow attrition of religious certainty

Andrew Copson 38:27

I suppose sometimes we are looking around in the sources, the Christian sources, for evidence of the non-religious. That is quite common. Even at the beginning of Christianity in the Roman world, one of the ways that we often know about the more humanist-inclined people is in the Christian refutations of their works that we still have. Whereas the original works were destroyed, you can deduce something of them from the Christian refutations. And that's sort of the business that you're in. And I remember someone saying to me, a Jewish humanist, as it happened, an ethnic cultural Jewish humanist said, Oh, I'm very much in the Jewish tradition, because if you read Proverbs, it says the fool hath said in his heart there is no God, well, that means that there must have been people at the time who said there were no God, and I'm one of them 3,000 years later. I thought, yes, I suppose that's right. But if we pull back from the this quite long period that we've been talking about from the let's say the 1500s to the early 1700s, and think about what the impact of some of these people was in their own time and how they fit into the wider history. Michael, in your uh book, you've in your book particularly but in your wider research too, you've uh picked some individuals because they're there in the sources, there's material about them and so on. And they're fascinating people, often very brave people. They've certainly got a sort of, like you say, Christian assurance that they're correct and they're interesting characters. But in terms of their impact at the time, would you say that they or what would you say the their impact was, or is it more of the wider phenomenon that they illustrate rather than being personally I think it's more of a process of slow attrition.

Michael Hunter 39:57

That's what struck me about the 18th century is that it just seems to be it just seems to be b become increasingly almost normal to for people to express casual doubts, and for other people not to get het up about it. And it's that sort of process of gradual change that seems to me to explain basically the origins of modern pluralism. Obviously, there are there are moments of religious revival, etc. But in general, there's a sort of decay a decaying of religious religiosity, a greater secularization in many areas of human thought, which obviously the Enlightenment very much strengthens. And it seems to me that that makes that that that makes these people not stand out anymore, that they that they merge into the landscape of a kind of half-belief which has characterized Western Europe ever since.

Modern echoes and further reading

Patrick McGhee 40:47

Yes, I think that there's a lot in that. I think we often assume that the story is a political and legal and legislative one and a scientific one, this story of linear progress, this story of quite dramatic change from an age of faith to an age of reason. But I think much more interesting now is the work that Michael's doing to uncover this gradual progression, this almost unintentional consequence, perhaps, of religious and political and cultural change that kind of isn't perceptible in the more pronounced milestone moments in the history of philosophy and science, but can be unearthed from people who have been marginalized, overlooked, but whose evidence remains. And when it's actually revealed in works like Michael's, it's very overt and actually starts to get the ball rolling on some of these things. I suppose I would add that another aspect of the work I'm focusing on is this idea that this is something that needs more work, but this idea that once you're willing to countenance the possibility that apism isn't just this abstract other intellectual point that other people hold, but something that your neighbor might be thinking and that you might experience momentarily, and that it has this kind of sensory emotional quality as well as a political and an intellectual quality. It is possible that it becomes easier to countenance, easier to contemplate. And for a lot of people, that's disgust and ridicule and worry that it might be promulgated. But for an increasing number, I suppose it becomes something that they're willing to live with or live beside or recognize in other people. And there is a visual dimension to that. And that's another thing that hopefully I'll be publishing soon, isn't it? Is a some research on the ways in which atheism has been not just written about in text, but visually depicted from the mid-16th century through to the early 1700s. And that involves again a lot of monstrous depictions, a lot of negative depictions, but it puts in people's minds a visual idea of what atheism and heterodoxy might be. So there is a story somewhere in here about the gradual unintentional normalization of these things.

Andrew Copson 42:51

Maddie, it's such an interesting period, isn't it? We look at a lot of periods as we do this podcast and the work that we do together on humanist history. But I really like this one because I think partly because it is just does feel like this transitional moment that's really important in its own right. But it also is a period that demonstrates the perennial nature of these sorts of beliefs that we're talking about. They do just arise in societies when people start to think about the world around them in with a modicum of freedom. And it just is one of those things I think that brings this whole sort of sense of a tradition of this way of thinking alive.

Madeleine Goodall 43:26

Yeah, absolutely. And I also think, and I love some of the phrases that have been used so far, this idea of a potpourri of dangerous ideas that Thomas Aikenhead experienced, but also that concept of why they dared, why these people did do this. I think there's something in there, as you say, aren't you, about that kind of the perennial nature of these ideas. But also there's something in there that's still incredibly relevant now. I often think that when you hear about people being persecuted for non religious beliefs in countries where that is still incredibly dangerous. Illegal, punishable, and also people who the faith-to-faithless service through Humanists UK deal with, where it's these people who, at huge personal expense, has dared to not only arrive at these conclusions and then but then express them and act on them in a way that's about being honest with themselves, honest with other people, which I think is, as Michael was saying, the daring of that, both historically and now, is just it's staggering in many ways. And it does go to show something really significant about what those ideas actually mean to us, what those beliefs do mean to us, and how acting in accordance with those has always been significant to people as far as it has been possible. I hadn't thought about that.

Andrew Copson 44:46

Yeah, you're right though. We work a lot with people who leave high control religions in Britain today, ex-Muslims, ex-Jehovah's Witnesses, ex-Ultra-Orthodox Jews. And you're right, I was thinking about this in purely historical terms, especially when Michael was talking about, well, you know, I wouldn't be hanged like Aikenhead was willing to be hanged or whatever. And I thought, oh no, I wouldn't either, Michael, I completely agree. But then of course we do meet people who've walked away from everything, given up everything, family, community, home, a significant part of their identity, just because they thought that this was right. And that is a certain type of self-assurance of which people are clearly capable of at any time in history. I think we need to bring these people in particular to the attention then of apostates today, Maddy, that we work with, that they should be they can petition for a statue of Aikenhead.

Madeleine Goodall 45:29

Yeah, maybe it's a Faith to Faithless project that we should be initiating now. But I think it I do think it's true, and I think that is a a real value of, you know, for everyone, but perhaps particularly people who can draw some kind of strength, some kind of as again, as we all do to a certain extent. But I think knowing about these figures, recognising elements of yourself and your own ideas and your own development of your ideas, and your own bravery in these people in history is really important. And it's why I think that those talking about physical commemorations of people, whether it's plaques, whether it's statues, whether it's just bringing these people to light through scholarship, through books, through podcasts, dare I say, it's significant for that reason because I think we can take something from them. Otherwise, in many ways, no, I won't say what is the point, because we all recognise the point. It's of course valuable in and of itself to know about these people. But I think that idea of seeing not only the development of the tradition, but also the reflection of things that we're still exploring, struggling with today is really important. And I love that idea as well of what Patrick was saying about that idea, you know, the more we understand these things, the more throughout history, but also now we come to see these things as normal, as, you know, these differences of belief is actually completely natural, not inherently dangerous, not inherently threatening, but just a part of being a human being in society, then the more easily we can and successfully we can live in a pluralistic society and recognize that our neighbour might be a completely different belief system to us, but that's actually not a threat. It's an opportunity.

Andrew Copson 47:13

Of course, we have Michael's excellent book, Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment, in all good bookshops, so you can go out and buy your copy now. Patrick, where can people find out more about the work that you're doing?

Patrick McGhee 47:24

I'd have several articles out there. I suppose um what I would highlight and point people towards would be a forthcoming volume from Palgrave Macmillan. It's an edited collection of essays from excellent scholars, including Michael, focusing on this question really about rethinking atheism in the early modern world. What were all the different ways in which atheism manifested, not just intellectually and philosophically, but also as an aspect of experience, an aspect of cultural encounter and kind of social interactions. And so that that should be coming out soon, probably in 2026. We'll see. It's all done and ready to come out. It just needs to be put together and made. So we're hoping late 2026.

Andrew Copson 48:06

Excellent. Well, it's something to look forward to. Thank you both for joining us for the discussion today. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanists UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanists UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanists UK. This podcast was produced by Humanise Live.

Madeleine Goodall 48:29

and find out more about the rich history and influence of Humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heritage.humansits.uk