God Bites the Dust

Scott Bradfield interviews S. T. Joshi about the second volume of “The Downfall of God.”

By Scott BradfieldDecember 25, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• History

THE NAME S. T. JOSHI probably circulated on the periphery of my general literary awareness for several decades, but it wasn’t until I moved home to California in 2017 that I gravitated toward two of Joshi’s premier obsessions—H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. I had never rated either of these writers very highly in the preceding 60 or so years of my life. The little I had read of Lovecraft seemed, to me, comically over-the-top and ridiculously garish—and he was often pushed upon me by youthfully excited students in creative writing seminars. And while I found Smith slightly more interesting (largely because, like me, he had been a Californian from birth), I couldn’t quite follow his prose. I never expected to like or enjoy reading either of them.

Perhaps I just had more time and patience in retirement, but after picking up a couple of Joshi’s excellent Penguin editions of both Lovecraft and Clark—each including the readable, readerly preface I have learned to expect from Joshi—I soon found myself staying up late with the sort of avid absorption I rarely enjoy these days. And when I sought to read further “weird tales” or “horror” writers, I often found myself following trails in the woods laid down for me by Joshi, picking up more of his excellent Penguin editions (of, for example, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood), along with his masterful two-volume biography of Lovecraft. Then, more recently, Joshi began editing the excellent Classics of Gothic Horror series with his wonderful colleagues at Hippocampus Press, featuring the likes of Robert W. Chambers, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Shelley, and William Hope Hodgson. Currently, he is working on biographies of Smith and another important California literary legend, George Sterling.

Nothing Joshi does surprises me in terms of either quantity or quality. And the fact that he has managed, in just the past few years, to produce two hefty volumes about the history of atheism seems like more evidence of steady production from the man. Like everything Joshi writes, these recent volumes are erudite, contentious, and intelligent, presenting clearheaded, well-written descriptions of very complicated (sometimes too complicated) thinkers, from Spinoza and Plato to Kant and Beckett.

Even a cursory list of Joshi’s books, awards, and achievements would take a few pages. His tomes include I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), and Lord Dunsany: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2013). He has also edited Atheism: A Reader (2000), The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft (2001), Searchers After Horror: New Tales of the Weird and Fantastic (2002), The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce (in three volumes, with Lawrence I. Berkove and David E. Schultz, 2006), and The Ghost in the Corner and Other Stories by Lord Dunsany (with Martin Andersson, 2017). He has received the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the International Horror Guild Award, among other literary prizes.

The following interview was conducted via email during a two-week period in early November 2025.

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SCOTT BRADFIELD: So, tell us a bit about yourself, especially your early reading habits.

S. T. JOSHI: I was five years old when I came to the United States from India. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a kindergarten class while listening to a teacher speak in a language I didn’t understand—English, of course. But at that age, you pick up a new language quickly, and I did. And yet, I didn’t really enjoy reading for the first five years of my life in this country. I had become so Americanized that all I wanted to do was play football, baseball, and other sports with my friends!

Any particular things about the United States that shocked or delighted you as a child?

Since I remembered so little of my life in India, I did not sense any radical adjustment to living in the American Midwest. That became my natural world. Also, I was completely accepted by my childhood friends, who saw nothing in my skin color or background that struck them as “foreign.” One of my earliest memories in the US is that of watching the funeral of John F. Kennedy on our tiny black-and-white TV. We had only been in this country for about five months, and we were aware that something strange had happened. Pretty soon, I was fully engulfed in American pop culture (I discovered the Beatles in 1964 and adore them to this day) and also became aware of the horrors of the Vietnam War. My sister Nalini took me to a protest rally at the University of Illinois when I was eight years old. I didn’t fully realize what was going on, but I knew that all these people were upset about something!

What was the first book you read that grabbed you and never let go?

When I was 10, Nalini became concerned that I wasn’t reading enough books, so she dragged me to the public library in Muncie, Indiana (where my parents were teaching at Ball State University). I gravitated toward fantasy and horror—and the first book (or series of books) that really got to me was C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I find this richly amusing because, of course, Lewis, a devout Christian, was manifestly attempting to inculcate Christian doctrine. But I knew nothing of that and just read the books as charming works of fantasy. I attempted to reread the Narnia books in my twenties, by which time I had already become an atheist, and found them utterly unreadable, precisely because the Christian undercurrent was so apparent. But of course, I later discovered a far greater fantasy writer in Lord Dunsany, whose work is devoid of Christian proselytizing.

Lovecraft seems to be the core figure in all your work, or is that a misassumption?

Oh, yes, Lovecraft has been my intellectual and aesthetic North Star ever since I discovered him at the age of 14. Of course, initially I was enraptured by his dense, richly textured style and the utterly novel imaginative scope of his tales. But very early on, I developed an interest in learning about Lovecraft the man and the thinker. Before I was out of high school, I was reading his letters—and, as a result, I developed the foundations of my atheism, as I found his arguments on the subject highly cogent. And Lovecraft led me to so many other writers whom I’ve explored—Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Ramsey Campbell, along with philosophers such as Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell. To this day, I regard Lovecraft as one of the great prose stylists in Anglophone literature, and one of the most innovative figures in weird fiction. But he is an intellectual titan also, and his discussions of materialism, atheism, aesthetic integrity, the place of humanity in the cosmos, and many other subjects are extraordinarily compelling.

HPL’s atheism (and yours) seems like a perfect segue into your latest magnum opus, The Downfall of God: A History of Atheism in the West (the second volume of which came out last month). What sort of religious upbringing did you have that led you to this subject?

Because I and my family left my native culture and came to a very different one, my religious upbringing was unusual. In fact, I had no religious upbringing. My father considered himself a secularist and did not wish his children to be indoctrinated into any religion—even Hinduism. But until I read Lovecraft, I was what might be called a “passive atheist.” The idea of any god existing—whether Christian or Jewish or Islamic or Hindu—struck me as not very credible, but when I read Lovecraft’s letters, I became convinced that the whole idea of God was a human fabrication. Through Lovecraft’s influence, I went on to read not only other philosophers but also scientists (Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, etc.) whose findings over the course of the 19th and 20th century did so much damage to the plausibility of Christian doctrine.

My training as a classical scholar at Brown and Princeton was also hugely important, making me aware of a thriving culture before the domination of Christianity. Quite frankly, I could not have written the long chapters on Greek and Roman religion in The Downfall of God without this training. So I am deeply indebted to the professors I worked with during my years as an undergraduate and graduate student.

In volume one of The Downfall of God, subtitled From Prehistory to 1600 (2024), you describe how “winners” wrote the history of religion—choosing useful-to-Christianity philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato over those who weren’t quite so useful and so became largely forgotten, such as the pre-Socratics. Whom do you consider the two or three most significant thinkers of the first 1,500 years in terms of their contributions to the basic ideas of atheism?

It is a truism that there were no “atheists” during the first millennium-and-a-half of the Christian era, since the idea of denying the existence of God was all but inconceivable. As such, it may be difficult to identify any specific thinkers who paved the way to later atheism. But there were two main trends that deserve attention. First, the rediscovery of classical thought in the 15th century brought to light a vital pre-Christian culture that displayed how literature, art, and philosophy could thrive without the heavy hand of religion restricting what could be thought or said. The main figures in this movement were such writers as Erasmus, François Rabelais, and Shakespeare, who created secular literature that could be appreciated without reference to Christianity. And second, the Scientific Revolution, beginning with Copernicus and carrying on with Galileo and Newton, began the demolition of the Christian conception of the universe and made it intellectually possible to subscribe to a nonreligious viewpoint. This process did not reach its culmination until Darwin’s theory of evolution, but the seeds were laid in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Would you say that Christianity has been inimical to human progress?

I am in fact quite hostile to Christianity. I wrote a book, God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003), taking to task a number of Christian thinkers ranging from T. S. Eliot to C. S. Lewis to Jerry Falwell, pointing out fallacies in their views. My belief has always been that the three great evils of human civilization are religion, misogyny, and race prejudice. (I have also compiled volumes on these latter two subjects.) Religion may be the worst. The chief reason people remain religious is [a combination of] childhood indoctrination and fear. Lovecraft said that if he was given a child at an early-enough age, he could have that child be completely convinced of the truth of the Greco-Roman religion. But he recognized that would be child abuse. So why isn’t it child abuse to brainwash a child into Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or any other religion?

Halfway through volume one, you take some time to discuss arguments about whether Jesus actually existed and, as a living, mundane, not-at-all-divine person, had initiated many aspects of Christian theology. In a footnote, you compare belief in his actual existence to belief in UFOs and QAnon conspiracies. Would you mind talking more about this?

This matter—as with all matters relating to biblical studies—is immensely complex. The simple version of the story is that a sect of Jews in Palestine at the turn of the first millennium CE were chafing under Roman rule and looking for a “messiah” (who in Judaism is always a human being, never a god) to lead them to freedom. They did so by using the literary device called “midrash”—a reinterpretation or rewriting of earlier texts to make them relevant to present-day concerns. For example, the infancy of Jesus bears a striking resemblance to the infancy of Moses—who was also invented, about eight centuries after his supposed existence, by Israelites chafing under the domination of Babylon. Moses almost certainly did not exist; the Exodus from Egypt never happened. Indeed, every single event associated with the life and death of Jesus has its exact parallel with an event in the Hebrew Bible. And there is not one piece of documentary evidence contemporaneous with Jesus’s supposed life (first four decades CE) attesting to his existence. The letters of Paul, in fact, portray Jesus as a spiritual figure whose “crucifixion” (he mentions it once, without providing any historical details) took place in heaven.

My familiarity with ancient cultures has made me aware of the ease with which these societies created myths and believed implicitly in their reality. Take the case of Hercules (Herakles in Greek), who was the offspring of a god and a human woman, who performed remarkable and perhaps supernatural feats, and who died a hideous death but was resurrected and now sits at the right hand of Zeus. The Greeks and Romans were firmly convinced that Hercules actually existed. There seems to me just as much evidence of Hercules’s existence as that of Jesus.

Needless to say, Christian theologians furiously oppose the idea that the existence of Jesus can be doubted. They have a vested interest in doing so: if any considerable number of people ever came to believe that Jesus didn’t exist, these theologians might be out of a job. But the “Christ myth” theory has been espoused by a number of leading biblical scholars ranging from Rudolf Augstein to Earl Doherty to Robert M. Price to Richard Carrier. Price’s Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? (2003) and other works are trenchant and amusing treatments of this subject.

Even those scholars who don’t go so far as to deny the historical reality of Jesus are compelled to admit that we know virtually nothing of his life or beliefs. As a respected historian of Christianity, Charles Freeman, wrote in his book A New History of Early Christianity (2009), “with so few reliable early sources no one can recreate a historical Jesus with any confidence.” Christians fondly like to believe that their religion is one of love and mercy, whereas the bad Old Testament portrays a religion of hatred and vengeance. This ignores the numerous instances in the New Testament where Jesus and others yearn to put their perceived enemies to the sword, to say nothing of consigning them to the “fire and brimstone” of hell—where, according to a statement put in Jesus’s mouth, the great majority of human beings will end up anyway, most of them for the crime of not believing in his divinity. And the history of Christianity during the millennium-and-a-half in which it controlled the levers of political and social power is certainly not filled with love and mercy.

You describe intellectual history as a sort of developing conflict between religious belief and skepticism, with the skeptics coming to life in the 18th century Enlightenment and the philosophes. Is this endless dialectic, to you, the central argument of Western culture?

I believe the case of Kant, along with that of many others, testifies to the difficulty that even learned individuals have in shedding the religious (and other) beliefs with which they were indoctrinated in childhood. I have been acquainted with many people who find the discarding of religious belief—in light of the overwhelming evidence of its falsity—acutely painful, even traumatic. I feel sorry for them, even though I cannot understand their situation—since, as I mentioned, I was not inculcated into a religion and was allowed to come to my own conclusions on the subject. All this just goes to show how criminally irresponsible it is to brainwash children into any belief, religious or otherwise.

Do you ever feel that many people might need to be comforted by these delusions of a benevolent (or even inimical!) god watching over the universe?

The idea that people “need” religion is based on numerous fallacies. For one thing, it is impossible to verify such an assertion. Moreover, it is unclear to me that religious belief affects behavior in any significant way. Sociologists have conducted numerous surveys over the decades and found that the behavior of religious and nonreligious people is statistically identical where moral (i.e., socially acceptable) action is concerned. In any case, it is entirely feasible to believe in something other than religion as a basis for one’s moral code—the good of society, the good of the human race, the good of all animate life, and so on. Such principles have the advantage of being based on realities rather than fantasies. But even freethinkers such as Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken were doubtful that any significant majority of people could ever embrace such a stance. It was Mencken who said that the number of genuinely intelligent people in the world came to about one-eighth of one percent of the population. I’ve often wondered if that figure is a tad high. But I do believe that giving up the brainwashing of the young into dogmatic religion would help—not that I expect that to happen anytime soon.

What is Darwin’s significance in the development of modern atheism?

Darwin’s theory of evolution—later verified by the genetics of Gregor Mendel and many other scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries—undercut the final intellectual pillar on which the Christian religion was based: the argument from design. This asserted that, for example, the human hand is so well suited to its purpose that it could not have “evolved” from an earlier state. Unfortunately for the religious thinkers who advocated this argument (and those who continue to do so under the minimally altered form of “intelligent design”), Darwinism has thoroughly accounted for the slow, gradual evolution of eyes, ears, hands, and all other organs to their present state—and has also accounted for the existence of vestigial organs, which the argument from design is unable to explain. This is why Richard Dawkins stated that only after Darwin could one be an “intellectually fulfilled” atheist.

In volume one, you stated early the conclusions you would reach at the end of volume two:

But at the end of my enquiry I hope to show what a radical change has been effected in Western culture by the shedding of religious belief, whether it be Christianity in all its variants, Judaism, Islam, or other faiths. I will not deny that such a development is, in my judgment, overwhelmingly positive.

Even a brief glance around our world today suggests that God has, as he often does, either crept in through the back door of Western culture or perhaps even come barging in through the front? Do you still feel confident about these conclusions?

I take a very long view of this whole situation. The contrast between the medieval period—and even the 19th century—and today, as far as the role of religion in society is concerned, is stark: religion has entirely withered as a force in government, law, science, culture, and so on. This situation is far more noticeable in Europe than it is in the United States—or perhaps it is that we in the US just have an unduly close view of fundamentalists, evangelicals, and others who continually try to shove religion down our throats. But it is my belief that even those who profess belief in God (whichever God that may be) rarely live their beliefs in any meaningful sense. They attend church one hour a week, and for the remaining 167 hours, they act as if there is no God. I am not saying they behave badly; as I’ve said before, the behavior of religious and nonreligious people is, in the aggregate, largely indistinguishable. We have so many other things to engage our attention (work, entertainment, etc.) that religion enters our consciousness very little. Obviously, this will differ from person to person, but the great majority of the people I deal with on a daily basis—who are by no means atheists and might even be disturbed by being considered such—do not act as if a god is looking over their shoulder all the time.

One of the most fascinating parts of your two volumes is how few unremitting and open disbelievers there were up through the 19th century—with the notable exceptions of George Eliot, Mark Twain, Émile Zola, and Ambrose Bierce. Are there one or two figures whom you especially admire in their apostasy?

One of the things I was happiest with in this book was my discussion of how not only philosophers but also creative artists—novelists, poets, playwrights, pictorial artists, sculptors, and composers—addressed the issues of religion, secularism, and the like. The later 19th and early 20th centuries saw a great many notable figures who wrote forcefully on this subject. I have to single out Leslie Stephen, who was both a philosopher and a literary critic; he wrote many trenchant essays on religion and religious figures, and should be much better known than as [merely] the father of Virginia Woolf. Thomas Henry Huxley was also a beautiful prose writer, and his attacks on the Old and New Testaments are bracing. An entire volume of Bierce’s writings on religion could be culled from his immense quantity of journalism. As it is, his definition of religion in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)—“A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable”—pretty much says it all.

Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1916) is one of his late pessimistic works; sadly, he stipulated that it be published only after his death. It advocates a kind of half-serious Satanism. Satanism is, of course, only marginally less absurd than Christianity, its only advantage being that it can account a little better for why so many horrible things happen in the world—which orthodox Christianity, with its assertion of an omniscient and omnipotent God, is utterly unable to do, in spite of mountains of sophistry by theologians over the centuries.

Are there affinities between your two most significant interests as a writer, historian, and editor—the “weird tales” authors and atheism?

I’m not sure I see a great many affinities between weird fiction and atheism—aside from the fact that some leading writers (such as Lovecraft) were avowed atheists and others (such as Lord Dunsany) probably were. On the other hand, Arthur Machen was a devout Anglo-Catholic, and Algernon Blackwood was a Buddhist and pantheist. As with so many other things, my interest in these two disparate subjects can be traced back to Lovecraft—and I like to think it also demonstrates that I am not a “Johnny-one-note” who can only write about a single topic.

Who are the living and working (and possibly even young) writers of weird fiction—and/or writers of atheist persuasion—that you find most interesting?

Good question! Ramsey Campbell is a lapsed Catholic and probably an atheist, although I don’t want to put words or thoughts into his mouth. I suspect many other writers— Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jonathan Thomas, Adam Nevill, Michael Aronovitz—are either atheists or generally secular. Religion simply has little bearing on their lives or works. Mainstream literature also strikes me as overwhelmingly nonreligious today. It’s been decades since a writer like Flannery O’Connor made religion a central aspect of their work.

Do you believe humanity can survive its desire for an omnipotent God who will take good care of them?

Perhaps I pulled my punches in my epilogue, but I’m quite confident that the great majority of people in the West—and increasing numbers elsewhere, even in places where theocracy appears to be in control—have done and can do very well without religion. Religion was dominant in those periods of history when the majority of people had nothing to look forward to but a blissful afterlife (this was the basis of Karl Marx’s comment on religion as the “opium of the people”). But now, even the lives of disadvantaged people are so full of diverse interests that religion plays little role. All this is not to say, of course, that secularists should just lie back and allow certain persons and institutions to force their religion upon us. We must absolutely fight back, and we will. But I myself am happy heckling from the sidelines. Satire and ridicule are very strong weapons against theocracy.

Is AI potentially a god?

Not only is AI not a god, but it is also not even a very good human being. It will never be human; it will only be a regurgitation of whatever data is fed into it.

If God showed up on your doorstep and said “See, asshole! What do you think now,” what would you tell him?

Bertrand Russell was asked this question, and what he said was (I paraphrase) “Well, God, you’ve made it awfully difficult for us human beings to verify your existence!” But I am confident that I will never have to face this question, from God or anyone else.