The Greek philosopher Epicure
Atheism is doctrines which consist in denying the existence of God. It could not be however satisfied to reject purely and simply the idea of God, because it poses a serious problem to him; from which does the universality come from the religious phenomenon?
The atheistic philosophers will be brought to seek what, in the psychological or social nature of the man, explains the genesis of the idea of God.
Ancient epicureanism
Epicure had prepared the way while establishing between the gods and the men a radical separation. Lucrèce, the Roman disciple of Epicure, while taking again the sights of its Master, outlines the first attempt to explain the origin of the religions. The religious beliefs are, for Lucrèce, of the errors which philosophy has the role of fighting in the name of the reason and of science. Hegel affirms that the religion said in images what philosophy said of concepts. Christian God, who incarnates himself to save the men, is not other than the universal Spirit; the mystery of the Trinity is the first representation of dialectical Hegelian.
“The opium of the people”
Feuerbach will develop a design close to that of Hegel. God is not other than “the solemn revealing of the hidden treasures of the man”, and the history of the religion merges with that of the human culture. Marx will reproach modern humanism for leaving without answer the crucial question: why the man give up does his true richnesses with an imaginary representation?
It is that Feuerbach remained as regards an abstracted humanism, whereas it is advisable to question the concrete history of the men, which is that their fights: “Religious misery is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other hand, the protest against real misery. (...) The religion is the sigh of the creature overpowered by misfortune, the heart of a world without heart, just as it is the spirit of a world without spirit. It is an opium for the people.”
A psychosociological point of view
The contemporary development of the social sciences will lead the atheistic philosophers to a psychosociological study of the religious illusion. The examples of Freud and Durkheim are in this respect very significant.
For Freud, God is the image of the father that the unconscious human one projects out of him and of which it makes an objectified reality. Like any oedipal relation, this representation is primarily ambivalent.
For Durkheim, on the contrary, a social phenomenon as the religious phenomenon can be explained only by other social phenomena. God, transcendent, dominates the man by his absolute power. He is the legislator, the guard and the model of the moral life. He made the man with his image, he is immanent, interior with the man. However, this double character is precisely that of the company. It also dominates the man of its authority, which does not prevent the individual bathing in social environment and from taking part, at the cost of heavy sacrifices, with the defense of the institutions and the values which the company substituted for the animal instincts. And Durkheim concludes: “The divinity is the expression symbolic system of the community.”
Agnosticism
This term, was invented by the British naturalist Thomas Huxley to the XIX E century, in opposition to the Gnosticism, which utilizes, in its analysis of the world, of the supernatural and nonrational phenomena.
Agnosticism refers to the philosophical design according to which it is impossible to the man to come to a conclusion on the existence of God and its nature, even more generally on any metaphysical question. Concurrently to this philosophical agnosticism near to the relativism and the Kantian criticism, the term indicates also a common attitude of spirit which regards the supra-empirical questions as futile because definitively unknowable by the reason.