Attributed to Democritus (5th century BCE, paraphrased from fragments):“Men suppose that the gods are the cause of all things, but nature works by necessity.”Aristotle, Physics:“Nature does nothing in vain.”Protagoras:“Concerning the gods, I am unable to know whether they exist or do not exist.”Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (adapted):“The thunderbolt is not hurled by Zeus; it follows necessity.”Synthetic aphorism:“What requires no intervention requires no god.”
If Essay I traced the ethical collapse of the Greek gods, and Essay II followed their explanatory displacement, Essay III turns to the most destabilizing development of all: the moment when religion itself becomes intelligible as a human, and not a divine, phenomenon.
By the late fifth century BCE, Greek thought had crossed a critical threshold. The gods had not only failed morally and become explanatorily unnecessary; they had begun to appear historically contingent, psychologically motivated, and socially functional. Religion was no longer merely questioned or sidelined - it was explained and removed of its necessity. Once that occurred, reverence could no longer be sustained by mystery alone.
This essay examines how Greek culture came to understand religion not as revelation from beyond the world, but as a product of human fear, gratitude, imagination, and political need. Sophistic thinkers offered early accounts of religion as invention; playwrights subjected the gods to ridicule before mass audiences; philosophers rendered divine agency irrelevant to human flourishing. By the *Hellenistic period, belief had settled into a residual role - preserved as custom, ritual, and governance, but no longer as conviction.
*The Hellenistic period in Greece spans from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the rise of the Roman Empire, typically marked by the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in 31 BCE (Battle of Actium) or 30 BCE. This era saw Greek culture (Hellenism) spread across vast territories from Greece to India, blending with local Near Eastern customs, and transitioning from independent (Greek) city-states to large kingdoms under Alexander's successors.
What distinguishes this development from earlier stages of unbelief is its calm sufficiency. Religion is not overthrown in outrage, nor abandoned in despair. It is outgrown. Life continues. Ethics persist. Meaning endures. The gods simply no longer matter in the ways they once did.
Essay III therefore traces a transition from doubt to demystification → from demystification to satire → and from satire to abandonment. It follows religion as it moves from sacred explanation to cultural artifact - retained where useful, mocked where excessive, and ignored where unnecessary.*
*The reason I circled back to Greece's Axial Age from our last major series is that I intend to explore why I think 21st Christianity has come full circle to find itself in a very similar position as ancient Greek theology had found itself three millennia ago (500 BCE).
Throughout these immediate essays, I to III, I have been hinting at the reasons and consequences for today's Christian faith's failure across the marketplace, with the Nones and Dones, with Science and Academia, and generally, across metamodern technocratic (democratically-imperialized?) societies.
Consequently, Essay IV will continue this current discussion by looking at Western democracies' most recent era from the 1980s through to 2000s+, and consider how Process Philosophy and Theology may help - not only Christianity, but all global religions - reground themselves fundamentally into the lives of their followers.
This of course, must also include all religious agnostics and atheists of various faiths as well. Which is also why I am working through essays I-III via the lost of faith; the loss of certainty; and the value of doubt. And why? Because within a processual framework its philosophic structure is expansive enough to absorb all walks of life into its integral philosophy. Thus Whitehead. Thus process theology. And thus my follow up quantum essays which I started a few weeks back (sic., quantum gravity, relational time and emergent geometry, Schrodinger, Dirace and the process of quantum becoming, divine decoherence (unpublished), imagining consciousness, time, and gravity) that will follow on to this series. - re slater
This analysis therefore is not undertaken to debunk religion retroactively, but to understand how a civilization can arrive at unbelief without nihilism. The world of Greek atheism, in its mature form, is neither militant nor triumphant. It is practical, ironic, and stable. The world works without the gods, and that realization proves more powerful than any argument against them.
The significance of this development extends far beyond antiquity. Once religion can explain itself - once its origins, functions, and mechanisms are made visible (... as we have done here in the "Evolution of Worship and Religion" series) - it can no longer rely on inherited authority alone. This condition defines not only the Greek experience, but the modern one as well.
Essay III thus completes the diagnostic work of this series. It shows how religion, when subjected to:
- ethical critique,
- explanatory success, and
- historical self-awareness,
may naturally dissolve without societal violence or regret. But what remains is not atheism as an ideology, but a question newly unavoidable:
If religion can be outgrown honestly, what kind of faith - if any - could remain credible afterwards?
Athens and the Sophistic Milieu, c. 450 - 400 BCE
Critias, Sisyphus fragment (late 5th c. BCE)“Some shrewd man, wise in counsel, invented fear of the gods.”
Prodicus (c. 465 - 395 BCE)“The gods are deified benefactors.”
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (c. 50 BCE)“Fear was the first thing that created gods.”
By the late fifth century BCE, Greek thought begins to do something unprecedented: it explains religion without reference to the divine. This is not yet mockery, nor outright denial. It is analysis. Religion becomes a phenomenon to be accounted for in human terms - psychological, political, and cultural.
The Sisyphus fragment, attributed in antiquity to Critias or Euripides, offers the clearest articulation of this shift. In a world once ruled by lawless violence, the fragment suggests, religion was invented as a mechanism of social control. Fear of unseen divine surveillance succeeded where human law could not. The gods were not discovered; they were sociologically devised.
Prodicus, another Sophist operating in democratic Athens, offered a less cynical but equally destabilizing account. In his view, early humans deified those who provided vital goods - bread, wine, agriculture. The gods emerged not from revelation, but from gratitude, memory and experience with hunger, catastrophe, and human need. Divinity is a retrospective honorific applied to human fragility and hard-won achievement.
Lucretius later sharpens both accounts, identifying fear - especially fear of death, destitution, and the ill entry of human suffering - as the psychological engines of religion. By the first century BCE, the explanation is complete: religion arises from human need, not necessarily the search-and-seeming-apprehension of cosmic truth.
What is decisive here is not disbelief - but demystification. Once religion can be explained without invoking gods, its authority changes irrevocably.
Process-Theological Coda
Process theology accepts this demystification as needful and necessary. That is, any account of religion which ignores its human construction, or basis, is ethically and intellectually irresponsible. Faith traditions arise within history, language, power, and fear; they do not descend unmediated - nor ungrounded - from thin air, from immortal eternity.
Yet process thought refuses reductionism. That religion is constructed does not mean it is therefore false or empty. It means that divine-human interaction, if real, is always mediated through evolving sociological/cultural and intermediary forms. The Sophists rightly dismantle naïve supernaturalism, but they lack a framework for understanding how value, meaning, and transcendence might still emerge within constructed forms.
The question becomes not whether religion is invented, but whether invention can still be responsive to a deeper relational reality.
II. Comedy and the Public Ridicule of the Gods
Aristophanes, The Clouds (423 BCE)“Zeus doesn’t even exist.”
Aristophanes, The Knights (424 BCE)“The fact that I’m cursed by them (the gods; supports their existence).”
Lucian, Zeus Refuted (2nd c. CE)“You are too clever. I will not argue with you.”
Where Sophistic analysis intellectualizes religion... Grecian comedy de-sacralizes it. Old Comedy, performed at major civic festivals in Athens, provided a sanctioned space in which the gods could be mocked openly. Laughter does what argument often cannot: it dissolves reverence.
In The Clouds, Aristophanes places outright atheistic declarations in the mouth of Socrates - unfairly, but effectively. Zeus is dismissed as nonexistent; clouds replace gods as explanatory agents. The audience laughs, but the damage is done. A god who can be ridiculed in public is no longer feared.
*It has been my argument from the outset of Relevancy22 that the Christian God was never one to be feared - but to reverenced for this God's divine love.... But not for his supposed wrath and anger, judgment and calamities - as placed upon El, Yahweh, Messiah, etc, by both the ancient Hebrews and later, Christians, in their distilling (condensing) tribal / cultic beliefs.
Stated more simply, "God is Love. God is not Wrath nor Judgment". If this is so, then the doctrines of Christianity altogether must be rearranged, restructured, reread, and rethought. Thus, process and thus, process theology. - re slater
In Aristophanes, The Knights, belief is reduced to irony. A slave’s “proof” of the gods is not blessing, but curse. Suffering becomes evidence - not of divine care, but of divine indifference. Faith collapses into gallows humor.
Lucian, writing centuries later in Roman Syria, completes the arc. His dialogues portray Zeus as rhetorically helpless before philosophical critique. The god does not refute arguments; he ends conversations in frustration. Divine authority has evaporated.
Comedy marks a crucial threshold: when gods become laughable, belief no longer commands emotional allegiance.
Process-Theological Coda
Process theology recognizes humor as a theological solvent. Static, authoritarian divinity cannot survive sustained irony. Laughter exposes the gap between claimed power and lived reality.
Yet humor also performs a clearing function. By stripping away fear-based reverence, it opens space for forms of the sacred grounded not in domination but in relational depth, empathy, and shared vulnerability. Comedy does not destroy meaning; it dislodges false ultimacies.
A divinity that cannot survive laughter is not worthy of trust.
III. Functional Atheism and the Gods Who "No Longer Matter"
Epicurus (Athens, c. 300 BCE)“The gods exist, but they are not as the many believe them to be.”
Epicurus“Death is nothing to us.”
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura“Religion now lies trampled beneath our feet.”
Epicureanism (... to live a happy life through enjoyment of simple pleasures, friendships, and freedom from pain, suffering, and fear) - represents the most stable form of Greek unbelief: functional atheism without denial. Epicurus does not deny the gods; he renders them irrelevant. The gods exist, but they neither create the world nor intervene in human affairs. They are models of tranquility, not agents of providence.
This move is crucial. By removing fear of divine punishment and abolishing the afterlife, Epicurus dissolves the psychological foundation of religion. If death is nothing, and gods do not judge, then religion loses its grip on human anxiety.
Lucretius’ poetic celebration of Epicurus, frames this as spiritual liberation. Religion is not merely false; it is oppressive. Once understood, it can be overcome - not violently, but calmly.
Here Greek unbelief reaches equilibrium. Life, ethics, and joy persist without gods. Belief survives only as cultural residue.
Process-Theological Coda
Process theology agrees with Epicurus that fear-based religion must be dismantled. A God who rules through threat or postmortem punishment is incompatible with moral freedom and relational trust.
Where process thought diverges is in its refusal to evacuate transcendence entirely. Epicurus empties the cosmos of divine concern; in contrast, process theology seeks a non-coercive, immanent sacred presence - one that invites rather than compels, participates rather than governs.
Epicureanism answers fear by withdrawal. Process theology will later attempt a more difficult task: to affirm value and hope without reintroducing domination.
IV. Religion After Belief: Disenchantment as Cultural Equilibrium without Nihilism
Epicurus“The gods exist, but they are not as the many believe them to be.”
Lucretius“So powerful was religion in persuading to evil deeds.”
Polybius“There is no way to restrain the multitude except by fear of the gods.”
By the Hellenistic period, religion has settled into a residual role. It persists as custom, law, and cultural memory, but not as conviction. Polybius’ frank admission reveals the final stage: religion survives as instrument, not truth.
This is not crisis; it is normalization. The gods remain, but they no longer govern life.
Consequently, the ancient Greek world had entered what can best be described as a post-belief religious equilibrium. The gods were neither actively contested nor deeply trusted. They persisted as inherited forms - embedded in festivals, civic oaths, domestic rites, and public architectures - but no longer as living sources of explanation, justice, or hope.
This transformation was accelerated by the political conditions of the age. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great (late 4th century BCE), Greek culture became cosmopolitan, plural, and administratively vast. Local gods lost their territorial intimacy. Religion became increasingly formalized, portable, and instrumental. The sacred was no longer encountered; it was managed.
Epicurean philosophy articulates the psychological interior of this moment. The gods exist, per Epicurus - but they do not care. They neither reward nor punish, neither create nor redeem. This is not atheism by denial, but atheism by irrelevance. Divine concern is removed from the structure of reality.
Lucretius radicalizes this insight by reframing religion itself as a historical liability. Religion, in his account, does not merely fail to help - it actively harms by amplifying fear, guilt, and submission. The gods persist only insofar as they are misunderstood.
Polybius, writing as a historian and political realist, reveals the final functional role of religion. Belief is no longer assumed; fear must be cultivated. The gods remain useful - not because they are true, but because they discipline the masses. Religion survives as social technology, not sacred encounter.
What emerges is not nihilism, but normalization. Life continues. Ethics endure. Meaning persists - now grounded in philosophy, friendship, civic order, and personal tranquility - rather than by divine supervision.
Religion has not vanished. It has been domesticated.
Process-Theological Coda
Process theology recognizes this equilibrium as a historical achievement - but also as an incomplete impasse. Greek culture successfully dismantled static divinity, but lacked a metaphysical account of why value, creativity, and moral responsiveness persist. Hence, the gods deserved abandonment.
The gods were abandoned because they could not evolve. What remained was a world awaiting a re-conception, or re-imagination, of The Sacred capable of processually becoming with it.
Yet what Greek thought, religion, and philosophy lacked was a metaphysical account of why value continues to matter once divine command dissolves. Meaning persists, but it becomes anthropocentric by default. Creativity, moral responsiveness, and relational depth are affirmed pragmatically, but not cosmologically grounded.
Process thought later enters precisely here. It affirms the Greek rejection of coercive divinity while refusing to reduce value to mere human convention. In a process framework, value is intrinsic to reality’s becoming; it is not imposed from above nor invented from below, but emerges through relational interaction at every level of existence.
The failure of Greek religion was not disbelief, but immobility. The gods could not grow with the world. Process theology begins where the Greek gods stopped - by asking how the sacred might remain credible within a world that is in the process of continually evolving.
Conclusion: When Religion Explains Itself Away
Across Essays I–III, the Greek gods do not disappear through assault, prohibition, or denial. They disappear through exposure - ethical, explanatory, epistemic, and finally anthropological. Once religion becomes intelligible as a human construction responding to fear, power, gratitude, and social need, its authority shifts irreversibly.
- First, the gods fail ethically. They cannot bear the moral weight of suffering, injustice, and human responsibility. Trust withdraws.
- Second, they fail explanatorily. Nature operates coherently without intervention. Need evaporates.
- Third, religion itself becomes transparent. Its origins, functions, and mechanisms are laid bare. Reverence thins into habit.
This is not collapse. It is maturation.
Greek unbelief, in its most developed form, is calm, stable, and sufficient. The world works. Meaning persists. Life does not require divine supervision. What ends is not the sacred, but a static conception of it.
Religion has explained itself away.
Process-Theological Coda
Process theology receives this history not as an enemy, but as a necessary prelude. Any faith that depends on cosmic/divine intervention, certainty, or fear would not have survived the Greek awakening - and should not survive even now today. The gods that fell in antiquity are the same gods that are still failing today, in modernity.
Yet process thought refuses the final Greek settlement. It does not accept that value must float ungrounded once command dissolves, nor that meaning must retreat into human subjectivity alone. Instead, it proposes that becoming itself (broadly stated) is sacred - that creativity, relation, responsiveness, and novelty are not accidental features of reality, but its deepest truth.
In this view, God, or the Sacred, is not the ruler above process nor a religious remnant within culture, but the very relational depth of the world itself - the persuasive presence that lures each moment toward greater intensity, harmony, and care. Divinity is no longer external to history, but participant within it.
Greek unbelief clears the ground. It removes gods who cannot grow, suffer, or respond (refer to essay 13: "The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power"). What remains is not atheism as finality, but an open horizon:
If reality is process all the way down,then faith - if it is to survive at all -must also become a processual faith.
That horizon now opens fully toward the modern “Age of Unbelief,” where the Greek questions return with renewed urgency - and where any credible (processual) faith must answer them without retreat.
No thunder fell
when the gods were understood.
They did not die.
They were translated -
through fear,
and gratitude,
into habit,
and religious law.
Once the gods were named,
they lost their teeth.
Once laughed at,
they lost their throne.
Once explained,
they learned to linger
as custom,
as warning
told to children
when certainty was needed.
The world did not mourn them.
It learned to speak
in other grammars:
friendship,
reason,
quiet joy.
And where the gods once stood,
nothing rushed in -
only space enough
to ask
what might yet become of the sacred.
January 8, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
I. Primary Ancient Sources (Accessible Translations)
Sophists & Religion as Construction
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Critias. Sisyphus Fragment. In Greek Lyric Poetry, ed. M.L. West.
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Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. Pamela Mensch. Oxford.
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Plato. Protagoras. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett.
Comedy & Satire
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Aristophanes. The Clouds, The Knights, Thesmophoriazusae. Trans. Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb.
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Lucian. Dialogues of the Gods, Zeus Refuted, Zeus the Tragedian. Trans. A.M. Harmon. Loeb.
Epicurean Thought
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Epicurus. Letter to Menoeceus. In The Epicurus Reader, ed. Brad Inwood.
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Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Trans. A.E. Stallings. Penguin Classics.
Historiography
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Polybius. The Histories. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press.
II. Core Secondary Scholarship (Graduate Level)
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Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard University Press.
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Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press.
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Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. III. Cambridge University Press.
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Parker, Robert. On Greek Religion. Cornell University Press.
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Sedley, David. Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. Cambridge.
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Mikalson, Jon D. Religion in Hellenistic Athens. University of California Press.
III. Advanced & Scholarly Studies (Post-Graduate / Research)
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Bremmer, Jan N. Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible, and the Ancient Near East. Brill.
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Henrichs, Albert. “What Is a Greek God?” in Greek Mythology and Poetics. Cornell.
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Versnel, H.S. Coping with the Gods. Brill.
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Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Thought among the Greeks. Zone Books.
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Osborne, Robin. The Transformation of Athens. Princeton University Press.
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Kindt, Julia. Rethinking Greek Religion. Cambridge University Press.
IV. Religion as Social Technology & Psychological Construct
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Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained. Basic Books.
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Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. Anchor.
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Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Norton. (For contrast, not endorsement.)
V. Bridges to Modern Unbelief & Philosophy of Religion
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Grayling, A.C. The God Argument. Bloomsbury.
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Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press.
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.
VI. Process-Theological & Constructive Trajectories (For What Comes Next)
(These should feel earned now—not imposed)
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Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Cambridge University Press.
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Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge University Press.
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Cobb, John B. A Christian Natural Theology. Westminster Press.
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Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism. Cornell University Press.
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Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery. Fortress Press.
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Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church. Fortress Press.
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