Western Atheism
A Short History
How disbelief in the gods took shape in the West, from ancient Greece to the modern age.
James Thrower’s history of unbelief in the Western tradition, from the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the open atheism of the modern era. He traces how doubts about the gods and later about God took shape in different periods, and shows how recent a fully explicit atheism is.
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Julian Baggini
Thrower’s book changed my view of the history of atheism in several ways. One was that it made clear to me that overt atheism is a reasonably recent phenomenon: it didn’t really emerge until quite late in the Middle Ages.
Interview · February 2016
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