There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion.
There had been theoretical arguments against religion before that made some headway - but this was a paradigm change. It was actually seeing dinosaur bones, and having to reconcile that with the idea of a 4,000 year old earth, that really changed hearts and minds. Suddenly the thought of being an atheist clicked with a lot more people. For the first time people credited the idea that Noah may have never had an ark. There was a distinct 'before' and 'after'.
Note: I'd love to annotate this with a link but unfortunately the results on this topic have been SEO-poisoned.
Catholic Church has no official teaching on the age of earth.
Atheism has always existed, it just may have been more or less visible depending on the political climate.
Even long ago when people worshiped ideas like Thagwag the rain god[0], there were probably non believers - are we so arrogant as to assume they didn’t exist?
“Hm we pray every day, sometime rain sometime not. Maybe no Thagwag?”
Like the Catholic Church Thagwagism also has no official teaching on the age of the earth.
These nuggets have little bearing on the proposition:
> There was an article recently about how it was the discovery of dinosaur bones that really began the shift away from organized religion.
which may or may not be true.
There was a general belief that Biblical interpretations gave a limited age to the earth, famously "calculated" in various ways by Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Ussher and John Lightfoot.
Deep geological time ran counter to that common belief.
Ancient Greeks are famous for more than their mythology, e.g. their natural philosophy that laid the foundations of modern science. Greek philosophers challenged theistic explanations of nature early on.
The roots of Western philosophy began in the Greek world in the sixth century BCE. The first Hellenic philosophers were not atheists, but they attempted to explain the world in terms of the processes of nature instead of by mythological accounts. Thus lightning was the result of "wind breaking out and parting the clouds",[49] and earthquakes occurred when "the earth is considerably altered by heating and cooling".[50] The early philosophers often criticized traditional religious notions. Xenophanes (6th century BCE) famously said that if cows and horses had hands, "then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cows like cows".[51] Another philosopher, Anaxagoras (5th century BCE), claimed that the Sun was "a fiery mass, larger than the Peloponnese"; a charge of impiety was brought against him, and he was forced to flee Athens.[52]
Greek thinkers had many different interpretations of the mythology.
For example Euhemerus believed gods and myths originated from normal humans and historical events which through retellings and embellishments over time became more and more fantastical.
Lucretius wrote a natural history where the world and life is created through natural processes (like natural selection) rather than throug a deliberate act of design by gods. So the idea is older than Jesus and does not require dinosaur bones.
Dinosaur bones just shows that species can go extinct which does not contradict religion AFAIK. More important was the discovery of geological layers which showed the world was much older than suggested in the Bible.
Honestly I don’t think the rise of Atheism have that much to do with natural history anyway. The French revolution happened before Darwin. It is about questioning and overthrowing religious authority - you can do that without a theory of evolution. We still don’t know life started but this does not prevent people from becoming atheist.
Specifically it was the development of geology as a science, as the context in which to place dinosaur fossils.
Dinos by themselves were taken by many religious people to be the abominable creatures destroyed by the flood, which Noah was not able to save in his ark.
Geology is what discredited the 6000-year-old-Earth idea. Even before radioisotope dating, it was clear that there was sedimentary landscapes that would’ve taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to form. And then there was fossils of megafauna right in the middle of these rocks? That, plus Darwin’s alternative explanation for the origin of life, is what broke the creationist narrative.
There had been theoretical arguments against religion before that made some headway - but this was a paradigm change. It was actually seeing dinosaur bones, and having to reconcile that with the idea of a 4,000 year old earth, that really changed hearts and minds. Suddenly the thought of being an atheist clicked with a lot more people. For the first time people credited the idea that Noah may have never had an ark. There was a distinct 'before' and 'after'.
Note: I'd love to annotate this with a link but unfortunately the results on this topic have been SEO-poisoned.