This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.

Worship is typically understood as an act of religious reverence and devotion to a deity, usually involving some ritual. I aim here to explore whether, and how far, we might make sense of the idea of worship even on robust atheistic assumptions, according to which there is good reason to believe that there is no deity, nor supernatural beings of any kind, so that the only live beings in the world are humans, animals, plants and the like. We shall call this Atheist Worship (AW). Beyond that, I wish to explore the possible value of such practice. If there is no God, then in some sense AW is normatively the only possible form of worship that is not based on error or pretence. But as we shall see, there is no reason why theists cannot also engage in many forms of “AW” (in the sense of engaging in practices expressing attitudes of reverence and devotion towards something held to be of great value and importance, without theistic assumptions), so the value of this project does not depend upon atheism.

This chapter explores theologian and pastor Johann Joachim Spalding’s immensely popular Bestimmung des Menschen (eleven editions between 1748 and 1804), its reverberations throughout the German Enlightenment, and the ways in which it intersected with both philosophical and religious questions about humankind’s place in the world. The chapter discusses the ways in which religious thinkers attempted to provide new “apologies” for Christianity against deism and atheism, how they did so in a modern, literary German that solidified their positions in the public sphere, and how these interventions also shaped philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) as an object and term remains enmeshed in our imaginaries, narratives, institutions and aspirations. AI has that in common with the other object of discussion in this Cambridge Companion: religion. But beyond such similarities in form and reception, we can also speak to how entangled these two objects have been, and are yet still becoming, with each other. This introductory chapter explores the difficulty of definitions and the intricacies of the histories of these two domains and their entanglements. It initially explores this relationship through the religious narratives and tropes that have had a role to play in the formation of the field of AI, in its discursive modes. It examines the history of AI and religion through the language and perspectives of some of the AI technologists and philosophers who have employed the term ‘religion’ in their discussions of the technology itself. Further, this chapter helps to set the scene for the larger conversation on religion and AI of this volume by demonstrating some of the tensions and lacunae that the following chapters address in greater detail.

Survey data, despite limitations, offer the clearest window on the current state of global religiosity, showing the sharply divergent ways religious impulses and their absence have manifested in different nations and regions. After a discussion of religious literacy, we explore what cross-cultural survey research teaches about the global distribution of religious belief. Research suggests that atheism is rare, especially outside of Europe and a few industrialized countries. Beyond this, studies confirm that countries differ greatly in the prevalence of various religious beliefs, including belief in a personal God who intervenes in human affairs. Some careful projections also suggest that significant changes are coming over the next few decades in the relative sizes of different religious groups around the world. In the United States, survey data suggest that – despite some recent changes -- people continue to be relatively religious when compared with other highly industrialized and economically developed nations. The second half of the chapter looks at the empirical relationships between religiosity and education, intellect, thinking styles, gender, age, and personality.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.

The Euripides described by ancient biographers is the Euripides Aristophanes portrays in the comedies he wrote for Athenian audiences after the devasting plague of 430–429 BC: immoral, sophistic, and irreligious. Biographers created new anecdotes about him, using the comic poets’ techniques, taking lines from his dramas out of their original contexts and placing them in anecdotes in which they could be repurposed to express his personal thoughts. The process of transforming literature into biography can be seen most clearly in the Life of Euripides by the Hellenistic biographer Satyrus, which is based almost entirely on anecdotes created to provide new contexts for some of Euripides’ most memorable lines; for example, an account of Euripides’ death mirrors the account of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ drama Bacchae. The idea that Euripides was critical of ancient religion, like some famous philosophers, explains why Diogenes Laertius refers to Euripides more frequently than any other poet. These ancient characterizations continue to have a profound and misleading influence on modern interpretation of his dramas, demonstrating how transformative an effect a skillful comic poet can have on the course of literary history.

The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

This chapter explores the implications of the new status of belief by reconsidering traditional arguments for the existence of God. If disbelief in the supernatural was not a live option before the appearance of modern secularity, what was the point of articulating proofs of God’s existence? This chapter shows that the so-called classical proofs performed a very different function to the one that they were later to assume, being more akin to spiritual exercises than logical arguments constructed from neutral premises. Crucially, one of the central ‘proofs’—that based on universal consensus—involved an appeal to the ubiquity and universality of religious belief. The demise of this ‘argument’ in the early modern period signalled a major change in how belief in the supernatural came to be understood, indicating that the burden of proof was shifting from unbelievers to believers. This was accompanied by a new conception of natural theology, understood as an enterprise that could provide support for religious belief on rational grounds alone. The changing status of natural theology and proofs for God’s existence correlated directly with the appearance of a new notion of belief and the requirements for its justification.

Chapter 8 examines the way in which the life of the Buddha was ‘demythologised’ so that he was then worthy of comparison with other great men of history. He became the Light of Asia, the Indian Luther, a competitor of Jesus, and the philosopher of a new rational philosophy and a this-worldly ethics for a disenchanted age. This was now a very human Buddha, neither a god nor a superman. This historical Buddha was to become normative within the West in the twentieth century, available for absorption into new forms of enchanted and disenchanted Western spirituality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between myth and legend in the life of the Buddha in the modern West. It argues that the ’historical Buddha’ cannot be found behind the Buddhist texts.

This chapter undertakes a collective biography of socialist intellectuals working in the Berlin Free Religious Congregation to explore the common sociological factors that contributed to this intellectual type.

In the late fifth century BCE, traditional religious beliefs and practices were being reconsidered from a variety of intellectual fields and viewpoints, but perhaps most vigorously interrogated by the Sophists. Although ancient Greek religion was characteristically open to change and local variety, the Sophists and contemporaneous thinkers put this flexibility to the test, as ancient reports of trials against intellectuals on account of their religious views attest. Anaxagoras and Socrates, in different ways, offer novel perspectives on what the divine is and is not; Protagoras in one way and the Derveni author in another question traditional certainties about our access to and knowledge of the divine; Prodicus, Democritus, and the so-called Sisyphus fragment provide psychological and/or sociological explanations of religious beliefs; and characters in plays by Euripides and Aristophanes deny outright the existence of the gods and, with that, the existence of traditional moral values.

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.