The word atheist is early modern; the doubt is ancient
English borrowed atheist by 1566 and atheism by about 1587, but godless philosophies are far older. Greek átheos once meant impious before it marked denial of gods. In India, Charvaka materialism and creator-free Buddhist and Jain paths long treated deities as optional or absent.
Positive atheism asserts no deities exist; negative atheism finds their existence improbable without claiming certainty. Philosophical atheist thought surfaces in Europe and Asia by the sixth or fifth century BCE—Greek drama voicing doubt, Charvaka antireligion in India, and atomists Leucippus and Democritus explaining the world by particles in void. Greek átheos shifted in the fifth century BCE from “godless” censure toward active denial; Christians and Hellenists later flung the insult at each other. Self-avowed atheism as a belief label appears in late eighteenth-century Europe, first aimed at the Abrahamic God before globalizing.
Eastern traditions offered salvific paths without creator worship. Early Buddhism needs no supreme maker; some Buddhist thinkers call eternal-creator belief a distraction. Jainism, organized around Mahavira in the sixth century BCE, holds an uncreated universe of matter and souls without an omnipotent creator. Within Hindu astika schools, Samkhya and early Mimamsa systems likewise omit Ishvara: the fourth-century CE Samkhya Karika of Ishvara Krishna is dualist and atheistic, and Mimamsa focused on Vedic ritual efficacy without requiring a god.
Charvaka, known mainly through opponents, urged a prosperous life in this world; Ajita Kesakambalin in the sixth century BCE denied postmortem survival. Materialists still debated at Mughal emperor Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri Ibadat Khana in the late sixteenth century, and Jesuit reports carried Indian skepticism to Europe. Related English coinages followed: deist in 1621, theist in 1662, deism in 1675, theism in 1678, their meanings shifting as atheism pressed the vocabulary.
Source: History of atheism
