Eighteenth Century Atheists

18th Century

Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach
Donatien Alphonse-Francois De Sade
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Jean Meslier
David Hume

David Hume (1711-76) 1766 (oil on canvas) by Ramsay, Allan (1713-84).

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach (1723 - 1789)

Paul-Henri Thiry was a German-French philosopher and encyclopedist. D'Holbach is widely regarded as being the first proper avowed atheist in Europe, and his atheistic metaphysics was materialistic. D'Holbach's System of Nature, published in 1770, espoused an openly atheistic philosophy, and quickly became known as the 'Bible of atheism'. D'Holbach held that religion obstructed human progress, and regarded the world as completely explicable in materialist terms.

Donatien Alphonse-Francois De Sade (1740-1814)

De Sade was a French aristocrat and philosopher, as well as a writer of extreme pornography (the term 'sadism' derives from his name). In De Sade's view, atheism legitimised sexual experimentation, since without a God there was no justification for setting any limits on human action. De Sade was in this sense an example of Enlightenment philosophy taken to its extreme, advocating total freedom and recognising pleasure alone as the goal of life.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

La Mettire was a French physician and philosopher, and an early exponent of French materialism. La Mettrie is chiefly famous for his work L'homme machine (1748), in which he espoused a thoroughgoing materialist account of human nature. In ethics La Mettrie defended a purely pleasure-based view of the proper end of human life, and advocated atheism as the only means of liberating human beings from the various forms of oppression which stand in the way of human progress.

Jean Meslier (1664-1729)

Jean Meslier was a Catholic priest who is often identified as one of the first intellectual atheists in Europe. Meslier was not an avowed atheist during his life, but on his death it was discovered that he had written a book-length Testament which promoted virulently anti-Christian views. Whether or not Meslier's views as expressed in the Testament strictly count as atheistic rather than deistic remains a matter of contention.

David Hume (1711-1776)

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian. During his lifetime Hume was careful to disguise his own views, so the question of whether he was an atheist or merely a deist remains debatable to this day. Hume's most famous anti-religious work is his Natural History of Religion (published posthumously in 1779), which offers an account of the (merely natural) origins of religious beliefs and is widely regarded as the pre- eminent modern critique of philosophical theology.

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