And what about this for pre-Darwinian atheism (from the Wikipedia article on the Epicurean writer, Lucretius):
Lucretius identifies superstition with the notion that the gods created our world or interfere with its operations in any way. Fear of such gods is banished by showing that the operations of the world can be accounted for entirely in terms of the purposeless motions of atoms through empty space, instead of in terms of the will of the gods. The fear of death is banished by showing that death is annihilation, and so, as a simple state of nothingness, death can be neither good nor bad. Lucretius also puts forward the 'symmetry argument' against the fear of death. In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which really wasn't so bad after all.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible