On this episode of five minutes in church history we are trying something a little different usually we talk about things within theism and we are very much interested in a theistic tradition

But today let's talk about the opposite of that and the history of atheism.

Well you could say atheism goes all the way back to the very beginning, back to the garden.

You could say it goes back to the Psalms, isn't it?

Psalm 14 verse 1 that says, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.

But what we are talking about on this episode is the history of atheism in the modern world.

As an English term, the first time we see it is in the middle of the 1500s but we see it especially in the

modern world of the 19th and 20th centuries if we look at today's landscape

the latest poll I saw goes back to 2014, but it says that just under 3% of Americans

claim to be atheist. Now if you throw into that category the so-called nuns, these are folks with no religious affiliation

and really no religious inclination, then we're up in the 20 percentile.

You might call them practical atheists.

So we've got confessing atheists and practical atheists.

Where did they all come from?

Well, back in the 1720s we find an atheist, but he seems to be a literary creation.

This is Tom Puzzle, and this figure, Tom Puzzle, a fictional literary creation, would show up in the pages of various

magazines in the colonies and he would be used from time to time to comment on current events or to add some color to current events. But what

we really find in the 1700s and into the 1800s is the precursor to atheism which is

deism.

So theism of course believes in a god who created the world,

a god who is active in sustaining the world.

Theism has with it the idea of sovereignty and providence

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