Nineteenth Century Atheists

19th Century

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
Karl Marx
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Auguste Comte
David Friedrich Strauss
Charles Bradlaugh
Herbert Spencer
Thomas Henry Huxley

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804-1872)

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German philosopher and critic of religion. Feuerbach began his philosophical career as a follower of Hegel, but by the 1840s he had become the leader of the radical Young Hegelians. His most important work, The Essence of Christianity (1841), develops the idea that religion is a mere projection or 'objectification' of human emotions and longings. Humans unconsciously project their desire for meaning and immortality onto the universe, giving the name 'God' to what they themselves have projected. Feuerbach's projection theory had an immense influence on the development of European atheism.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Marx was a German philosopher and political economist. According to Marxist materialism, all human thought and behaviour is determined by socio- economic factors. Marx distinguished between the determining socio- economic 'base', and the determined ideological 'superstructure'. Religious ideas - as mere superstructure - were to be explained away by the socio-economic conditions which directly caused them. According to Marx, religion was a mere epiphenomenon, the expression of social and economic alienation. Similarly to Feuerbach, Marx presupposes atheism and offers a genetic account of religion.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in 1883,

illustration from 'Nietzsche' by Daniel Halevy (b/w photo) by German Photographer, (19th century) Private Collection/ Archives Charmet/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsche was a German philosopher. Nietzsche famously distinguished between master and slave moralities - the latter of which he regarded as a perversion of the former, original type of morality. Whereas master morality, such as that of Homeric Greece, equated 'good' with qualities such as wealth, health and strength, and 'bad' with weakness, sickness, and poverty, the Abrahamic religions turned these values around. It regarded qualities such as humility, subservience, charitableness as 'good', and strength (especially when expressed as power to inflict pain, cruelty) and wealth as 'bad'.

Nietzsche regarded this 'transvaluation' as a dishonest attempt on the part of the resentful subservient classes of humans to overcome their masters. According to Nietzsche, 'slave morality' represented a sickness which needed to be overcome, and this necessitated the complete overcoming of traditional religion. Nietzsche, like Feuerbach and Marx, does not suppose that God's existence has been ruled out philosophically or scientifically, but rather he presupposes God's non-existence and seeks a genetic account - in Nietzsche's case, his historical account of the establishment of slave morality over master morality - as a means of explaining away belief in God.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Comte was a French thinker who is generally regarded as the father of sociology. Comte argued that the development of human consciousness could be divided into three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific, or 'positive'. In the first, theological stage, humanity located the causes of events in superhuman beings (gods); in the second, these were transformed into metaphysical abstractions; in the third, both previous stages are surpassed and humanity addresses itself exclusively to observed phenomena. Comte's social evolutionism explains away religion as a relic of the past. However, Comte recognised that human beings needed a replacement for religion, and he instituted the ersatz religion of Positivism.

David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874)

Strauss was a German theologian. In his most celebrated work Life of Jesus (1835) Strauss denied Christ's divine nature through an application of the historical approach to scripture. According to Strauss, the gospel miracles were to be understood mythically and not literally. Strauss' influence on subsequent German atheism was immense.

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891)

Charles Bradlaugh, although today a largely forgotten figure, was probably the most famous British atheist of the nineteenth century. Although his atheist metaphysics was somewhat eclectic, he was immensely influential in popularising atheism within Britain. Bradlaugh was president of the London Secular Society from 1858, and in 1866 he co-founded the National Secular Society.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Herber Spencer was an English philosopher. Spencer advocated a general evolutionism and is famous for coining the expression 'survival of the fittest' in his Principles of Biology (1864). Spencer himself is somewhat unfairly accused of having been a Social Darwinist, although his views certainly lent themselves to propagandistic use by Social Darwinists. According to Spencer both the physical world, living organisms, human consciousness and human societies evolve. Spencer was notorious in his time for rejecting traditional religion, but he was strictly speaking agnostic rather than atheist, since he did not consider that human beings were capable of absolute knowledge concerning the ground of phenomena, whether that be a God or not. His indirect influence on subsequent British atheism was, however, profound.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

Thomas Huxley was an English biologist. He is best known as 'Darwin's Bulldog' on account of his vigorous support of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Although critical of traditional religion, Huxley, like Spencer, was himself an agnostic, and took the view that human beings are not capable of knowing about the ultimate ground of the universe. Through his advocacy of scientific education and his critique of tradition religion, however, he has had a deep indirect influence on subsequent British humanism and is held in high esteem by contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

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