Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience

by Michael Hunter

Anxiety about the threat of atheism was rampant in the early modern period, yet fully documented examples of openly expressed irreligious opinion are surprisingly rare. England and Scotland saw only a handful of such cases before 1750, and this book offers a detailed analysis of three of them. Thomas Aikenhead was executed for his atheistic opinions at Edinburgh in 1697; Tinkler Ducket was convicted of atheism by the Vice-Chancellor's court at the University of Cambridge in 1739; whereas Archibald Pitcairne's overtly atheist tract, Pitcairneana, though evidently compiled very early in the eighteenth century, was first published only in 2016. Drawing on these, and on the better-known apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Rochester, Michael Hunter argues that such atheists showed real 'assurance' in publicly promoting their views. This contrasts with the private doubts of Christian believers, and this book demonstrates that the two phenomena are quite distinct, even though they have sometimes been wrongly conflated.

Genres: History

280 pages, Hardcover

Published October 5, 2023

About the author

Michael Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of numerous works on early modern science and culture such as The Occult Laboratory and the award-winning Boyle: Between God and Science.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Mankind does not strive for happiness; only an Englishman does that,” and the English of 17th century did everything possible to prove that Nietzschean exception while a few voices cried in the wilderness under the threat of legal sanctions. It was almost impossible to be an atheist (or deist) in pre-enlightenment England since no safe forum existed for thinking a blasphemy against orthodoxy.

Imaginary friends are hard to show not existing and the default position that the Church of England was right and it was up to lone voices to show that they could prove the ‘dragon was not in the garage’ as Sagan would say. This book does give long sections from brave thinkers appealing to reason over fiction and they were worth reading. Of course, definitionally atheism meant immoral by default and reason would have to wait for Spinoza to show the way. This book frequently mentioned Jonathan Israel’s book “Radical Enlightenment” and it worth reading as a sequel to this book to see what would happen next.