historyIs there a person that is recognized as the first person to publicly reject theism? Failing that, who is the person recognized as the first atheist philosopher?
It's likely that there has been atheists for as long as there have been theists however, the title of first recorded atheist usually goes to Diagoras of Melos in the fifth century BCE.
Little is known about him other than his atheism.
Euripides (480 - 406 BCE) may be candidate: ““Doth some one say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.”
Certainly not the first atheist, but perhaps the best known within the modern atheist movement in the United States is Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Her lawsuit, which reached the US Supreme Court and ended state sponsored prayer in public schools, brought atheism to the fore in the American media.
If you are looking for the source of atheism, and expecting to find one person, then the answer to the question is "No". Since atheist is defined as being against something, it is still valuable to ask the question and trace back different cultures and find its roots.
I found this guy recently as a source of current libaral Western thinking.
Socrates (if you accept him as a historical figure) was condemned to death for - amongst other things - "not believing in the gods of the state". I don't know if that counts, and it's certainly more recent (469 BC–399 BC) than the fifth century BCE that @Borror0 mentions, (but older that Pelagius).
According to Jennifer Michael Hecht, in “Doubt: A History”, page 11,
Socrates challenged every last conception of life as he knew it, even the idea of having a conception of it. Piety, materialism, hunger for power, and competition wer particular targets because of how they distracted people from reality. One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that – he questioned their every faith, their every way of life – so they called it atheism.
Prior to that, on page 7, she lays out a case that Xenophanes developed the first set of concepts about the attributes and nature of God, and so could be considered the founder of theology. Contemporary accounts of Prodicus, Hecht says, had him classed as “atheoseis.” All of this is in the 5th century B.C.E.
So, read “Doubt: A History” for a great background into irreligious thought through the ages.
My own, less scholarly take on the issue is this: The first atheist was the person who first had a theist label him with this pejorative epithet. (Reasonably sure it would have been a “him,” back in Greek times.)
No doubt there were thinkers PRIOR to this first atheist who share our view that the world does just fine without positing a supernatural set of beings to explain it. But the stigma of “atheist” requires a “stigmatizer,” and it looks like one was around 500 years before Jesus.
I don’t know who the first recorded atheist was, but it’s a certain fact that atheists were around back when the Old Testament was being written. The evidence is in the Bible itself, for example Psalm 14:1 -
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
Obviously the author wouldn’t bother to write that if all people believed in a god.
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