A Brief History of Secular Thought

A brief history of secular thought from the Enlightenment to the present, looking at how it has been shaped by culture and events. We start in the Enlightenment with Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Thomas Paine. Moving into the nineteenth century we look at literary influences like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Carlyle, then social critics like Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx. Charles Darwin takes a central position in the nineteenth century, followed by expositors like Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. And we conclude the nineteenth century with Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God. We start the twentieth century with Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell and look at satirical writers at the turn of the century like like Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. We conclude the twentieth century with Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and start off the twenty-first century with the New Atheists.