9. Lucretius
He never denied that gods exist, but always believed that if they exist, they have nothing to do with humankind. I wonder what the gods would get up to in that scenario? Watch a lot of Morgan Freeman movies on Netflix? Lucretius is a known follower of Epicurus and also subscribed to materialism.
“This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
But only Nature’s aspect and her law,
Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:
Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
Fear holds dominion over mortality
Only because, seeing in land and sky
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
Men think Divinities are working there.
Meantime, when once we know from nothing still
Nothing can be created, we shall divine
More clearly what we seek: those elements
From which alone all things created are,
And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.”
