Fragment attributed to a sophist (and applied to Protagoras):
“Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist, or whether they do not, or what form they have because of the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”
Aristophanes - The Knights (a dialogue between slaves):Slave: “Do you believe in gods?”
Other slave: “Of course.”
Slave: “What’s your proof?”
Other slave: “The fact that I’m cursed by them.”
Slave: “Well, that’s good enough for me.”
A Sisyphus fragment revealing ancient skeptical social criticism:The fragment describes religion as invented - to enforce morality; implying gods are human constructs, though no short quoted line survives besides this narrative summary.
Introduction: Why Visit Greek Atheism?
The modern discussion of atheism is often framed as a recent phenomenon - an outcome of scientific progress, Enlightenment rationalism, or postmodern skepticism. Yet this framing obscures a deeper and more instructive truth: the most sustained critiques of the gods did not arise from laboratories or revolutions, but from within the ethical, literary, and philosophical life of ancient Greece itself.
This series is undertaken to recover that forgotten genealogy.
Long before Christianity, Islam, or modern secularism, Greek poets, tragedians, comedians, and philosophers subjected their gods to relentless moral scrutiny. The result was not merely doubt, but a gradual withdrawal of trust. The gods were not disproved; they were interrogated - and increasingly found unworthy of the moral weight placed upon them. Divine injustice, indifference to suffering, and capricious power became problems that no amount of ritual or mythic explanation could resolve.
What followed was not an immediate denial of divinity, but a cultural shift: explanation without intention, ethics without divine command, and eventually religious practice without belief. Greek atheism emerged not as an ideology but as a lived posture - quiet, experimental, often ironic, and deeply ethical in motivation.
The purpose of this series is threefold.
First, it seeks to document the historical development of Greek unbelief across multiple domains - tragedy, comedy, philosophy, historiography, and natural science - rather than isolating atheism as a purely philosophical position. In Greece, disbelief was rarely systematic; it was cultural, poetic, and experiential.
Second, the series aims to distinguish Greek atheism from other forms of religious skepticism, particularly those found in the Hebrew tradition. Whereas Hebrew texts wrestle with divine justice within covenantal loyalty, Greek thought increasingly questions whether the gods themselves deserve loyalty at all. This distinction is essential for understanding how different civilizations confronted the problem of divine credibility.
Third - and most importantly - this study is undertaken because these ancient developments continue to shape the modern religious imagination. Many of the questions that trouble contemporary faith communities - about suffering, divine silence, moral incoherence, and the persistence of belief - were first articulated with startling clarity in the ancient Mediterranean world from its eastern Aegean Sea to its western Ionian Sea.
By tracing how Greek religion unraveled under ethical pressure rather than empirical refutation, this series provides a mirror for modern faiths confronting similar crises of credibility. It also prepares the ground for later constructive work, including process-oriented approaches to divinity that take moral responsiveness, relationality, and becoming seriously - precisely where ancient theologies faltered.
Essay I begins at the point of rupture: the moment when the gods were no longer trusted to be neither good nor divine.
I. The Moral Ambiguity of the Olympian Order
c. 8th - 5th centuries BCE
Homer, Iliad (c. 750 BCE)
“The gods spin sorrows for men, [so] that future generations may have something to sing about.”
Hesiod, Works and Days (c. 700 BCE)“The gods keep hidden from men the means of life.”
Aeschylus, Agamemnon (458 BCE)
“Zeus, whoever he is, - [and] if this name pleases him - I call upon him.”
Greek religion emerges in a world already marked by divine ambivalence. In Homer’s epics - the foundational texts of Greek education and identity - the Olympian gods are powerful but ethically opaque. They intervene selectively, deceive freely, and treat human suffering as narrative material rather than moral failure. Zeus presides over fate, but does not consistently correct injustice.
Hesiod intensifies this tension by portraying the gods not merely as indifferent, but as withholding. Human toil is not redemptive; it is imposed. Knowledge, prosperity, and justice are deliberately obscured by divine design. The cosmos is intelligible only to the gods, and they decline to share.
By the time of Aeschylus in the early fifth century BCE, this inherited ambiguity becomes explicit uncertainty. His hesitant invocation - “Zeus, whoever he is” - appears not in satire, but in the most solemn of tragic settings: the opening of the Oresteia, performed at the City Dionysia before the full Athenian polis. This is not private doubt; it is civic hesitation voiced in public ritual.
From the beginning, Greek religion sustains itself not through confidence in divine goodness, but through tradition, fear, and necessity.
Process-Theological Coda:
The phase questioning who Zeus was reflected an early religious imagination grappling with "power absent relational accountability." Authority precedes trust. Once moral reflection matures, such divinity becomes unstable.
From a process-theological perspective, the earliest Greek gods represent an intuition of cosmic power prior to moral relationality. Divinity is imagined as causal dominance rather than participatory presence. The gods act upon the world but are not meaningfully with it. They influence outcomes, yet remain untouched by the consequences of their actions.
This structure reflects an early metaphysical assumption: that ultimate reality must be immune to vulnerability. Power is preserved by distance. Change threatens perfection. The result is a divine realm that governs but does not mature, commands but does not learn, and survives suffering without being transformed by it.
Process theology will later reverse this assumption entirely. It insists that relational responsiveness is not a weakness of divinity but the very depth of sacred-divinity. A god who cannot be affected cannot be morally trustworthy. In this light, the Olympian gods do not fail because they are many, powerful, or divine - but because they are static, insulated, and ethically unaccountable.
II. Tragedy and the Exposure of Divine Injustice
c. 460 - 400 BCEEuripides, Heracles (c. 416 BCE) [reflecting on Zeus...]
“I am only mortal, but I outdo you in virtue.”
Euripides, Trojan Women (415 BCE)
“The gods bring all things to pass - yet allow injustice to prevail.”
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BCE)
“Count no man happy till he dies.”
Greek tragedy does not merely reflect religious doubt; it institutionalizes it. Performed during state-sponsored festivals, tragedies [sic, tragic plays acted out in public amphitheaters] were civic events, not fringe provocations. Their audiences included magistrates, priests, soldiers, and citizens. When tragedy interrogated the gods, it did so at the heart of public Greek religion.
Euripides, writing during the Peloponnesian War and of its moral disintegration across society, is particularly severe. In Heracles, Zeus’s failure to protect his own son results not in rage but moral comparison: the mortal Amphitryon claims ethical superiority over the king of gods. The charge is devastating precisely because it is restrained.
In The Trojan Women, first staged shortly after Athens’ brutal destruction of Melos, divine causality becomes indistinguishable from political atrocity. The gods preside over suffering but offer no justification. Their authority explains events but does not redeem them.
Sophocles’ closing wisdom - “Count no man happy till he dies” - signals the existential consequence of this theological collapse. If divine favor is unstable and inscrutable, then no life can be interpreted as blessed while it remains unfinished.
Tragedy thus performs a slow excommunication of the gods from moral trust.
Process-Theological Coda:
During these eras ethics overtakes ontology. Divinity is judged not by power but by responsiveness to suffering. A god incapable of moral responsibility ceases to function as a sacred being.
Greek tragedy introduces a decisive moral criterion that process theology later makes explicit: suffering demands response. The tragic protest against the gods is not that they lack power, but that they lack answerability. The gods neither justify their actions nor share in the cost of their consequences.
From a process perspective, tragedy marks the emergence of moral relationality as the measure of the sacred. A god who remains unmoved by suffering - even if causally responsible for it - cannot sustain worship without coercion. Tragedy thus anticipates the idea that divinity must be co-affected, not merely causative.
Process theology does not deny divine power; it redefines it. Power is no longer unilateral control, but the capacity to receive, respond, and transform suffering into new possibilities by a God who is also affected by loss, cruelty, and injustice. Tragedy reveals that without this relational depth, even the most powerful gods collapse under ethical scrutiny.
Euripides, fragment (late 5th c. BCE)
“If the gods do shameful things, they are not gods.”
Plato, Republic (c. 380 BCE)
“God is not the cause of all things, but only of the good.”
Epicurus (4th–3rd c. BCE)
“It is better to follow myth than to be enslaved by fate disguised as reason.”
By the late fifth century BCE, Greek thought increasingly assumes that moral judgment belongs to humans rather than gods. Euripides’ fragment makes this explicit: "Divinity is now measured by ethical coherence. Power without goodness is disqualifying."
Plato’s response is reformative rather than destructive. In the Republic, he sharply restricts divine causality, denying that the gods can be responsible for evil. This philosophical move salvages moral order at the cost of traditional mythology. Homeric theology is quietly rejected as pedagogically corrupt.
Epicurus completes the break. Writing in the aftermath of Alexander’s empire, he rejects both mythic tyranny and metaphysical fatalism. Even false stories, he argues, are preferable to systems that erase human agency and responsibility.
By this stage, ethics no longer requires divine enforcement. The gods may persist as symbols, ideals, or cultural residues - but moral authority has migrated decisively to human reason and experience.
Process-Theological Coda:
This moment marks a necessary purification. Ethics cannot rest on coercive transcendence. Any viable divinity must participate in moral becoming, not merely command obedience.
When Greek thought detaches ethics from divine command, it performs a necessary civic purification. Moral value is no longer grounded in divine authority, threat, or metaphysical supremacy, but in lived human discernment and responsibility. This is not secularization in the modern sense; it is moral maturation.
Process theology affirms this shift while resisting its final implication that ethics must therefore be godless. Instead, it argues that morality cannot be imposed from outside reality but must emerge within relational processes. Divine influence, if it exists, must operate persuasively rather than coercively - inviting rather than commanding ethical response.
In this framework, the failure of the Greek gods is not that they claimed moral authority, but that they claimed it without participation. Ethics cannot be grounded in a divinity that neither risks itself nor ontologically evolves alongside moral insight. Any viable theology must therefore reconceive God not as lawgiver above the moral world, but as a participant within its unfolding.
Conclusion
The Withdrawal of Trust
The Greek gods were not refuted; they were morally outgrown. Their collapse was not primarily intellectual but ethical. Once subjected to sustained moral scrutiny - by poets, tragedians, and philosophers - the gods proved incapable of bearing the cosmic weight of ethical justice, agential suffering, or human responsibility. They simply failed across all moral standards of living.
Greek atheism begins then not with denial, but with withdrawal: the withdrawal of trust, reverence, and moral reliance. The gods remain named, invoked, and ritualized - but they are no longer believed in as guarantors of meaning, justice, or care.
This withdrawal sets the stage for what follows: explanation without intention, belief without certainty, and eventually, religion without gods.
Process-Theological Coda
From a process-theological perspective, these developments reveal a recurring pattern in religious history: religious systems fracture when their images of divinity become morally outpaced by human ethical awareness. When human beings come to love justice more deeply than their gods appear to do, belief cannot survive unchanged.
What emerges in Greece is not atheism as negation, but atheism as refusal - a refusal to grant sacred status to a reality that does not grow, suffer, or respond. Process theology takes this refusal seriously. It does not attempt to rehabilitate the gods of myth or defend divine power divorced from moral participation.
Instead, process theology begins where Greek tragedy leaves off:
What kind of divinity, if any, can remain credible in a morally awakened world?
That question will quietly govern everything that follows in Essays II and III.
Sacred No Longer
When the gods were powerful
Thunder may have answered prayer,
yet the gods never deigned to explain it.
They spoke in signs,
not in reasons;
they acted, often
without accountability.
The faithful had learned their names
before they had learned justice;
... they also felt fear,
before they ever trusted.
The gods were strong enough
to wound the world -
but never gentle enough
to mend its injuries.
We sang to them -
mere worship could ever answer.
I. Primary Ancient Sources (in Translation)
Epic & Archaic Poetry
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Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore or Robert Fagles.
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Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Trans. M.L. West.
Greek Tragedy
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Aeschylus. Oresteia. Trans. E.B. Browning or Robert Fagles.
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Sophocles. Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald.
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Euripides. Heracles, Trojan Women, Bacchae, and fragments. Trans. James Morwood or Emily Wilson (where available).
Comedy & Satire
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Aristophanes. The Clouds, The Knights, Thesmophoriazusae. Trans. Jeffrey Henderson.
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Lucian. Dialogues of the Gods; Zeus Refuted. Trans. A.M. Harmon.
Philosophical Texts
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Plato. Apology, Republic, Laws. Trans. G.M.A. Grube.
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Aristotle. Metaphysics, Physics. Trans. Jonathan Barnes.
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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 or W.H.D. Rouse.
Skepticism
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Sextus Empiricus. Against the Mathematicians. Trans. R.G. Bury.
II. Core Secondary Scholarship (Graduate Level)
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Guthrie, W.K.C. The Greeks and Their Gods. Methuen.
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Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard University Press.
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Parker, Robert. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford University Press.
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Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press.
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Vlastos, Gregory. Socratic Studies. Cambridge University Press.
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Sedley, David. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity. University of California Press.
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Long, A.A. Hellenistic Philosophy. University of California Press.
III. Advanced & Scholarly Works (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.
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Mikalson, Jon D. Ancient Greek Religion. Wiley-Blackwell.
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Versnel, H.S. Coping with the Gods. Brill.
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Osborne, Robin. The Transformation of Athens. Princeton University Press.
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Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy. Penguin / Cambridge.
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Frede, Michael. Essays in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
IV. Works Bridging to Theology & Process Thought (for Later Essays)
(Not foregrounded yet, but cleanly relevant)
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Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Cambridge University Press.
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Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition.
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Cobb, John B. A Christian Natural Theology. Westminster Press.
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Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep. Routledge.
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Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church. Fortress Press.
V. Suggested Orientation for Public Readers
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Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. Ballantine.
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Ferry, Luc. The Wisdom of the Myths. Harper.
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Grayling, A.C. The History of Philosophy. Penguin.
