Socrates was one of the most prominent and first religious skeptics of whom there are records; he questioned the legitimacy of the beliefs of his time in the existence of the Greek gods.
Thomas Jefferson's The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, a literal cut and paste of the New Testament that removes anything supernatural, is a prominent example.
He critiqued popular religion of his time, particularly false conceptions of the divine that are a byproduct of the human propensity to anthropomorphize deities.
He took the scripture of his time to task for painting the gods in a negative light and promoted a more rational view of religion.
[11] This later inspired the philosopher Epicurus and the philosophy he founded, who held a materialist view and rejected any afterlife, while further claiming the gods were also uninterested in human affairs.
[12] In the poem De rerum natura Lucretius proclaimed Epicurean philosophy, that the universe operates according to physical principles and guided by fortuna, or chance, instead of the Roman gods.
[14] In ancient India, there was a materialist philosophical school called the Cārvāka, who were known as being skeptical of the religious claims of Vedic religion, its rituals and texts.
[18][19] There has been much work since the late 20th century by philosophers such as Schellenburg and Moser, and both have written numerous books pertaining to the topic.
[24] There are still echoes of early Greek skepticism in the way some current thinkers question the intellectual viability of belief in the divine.