Lucretius and the modern interdisciplinary critique of religion

Article compares some aspects of current interdisciplinary discourse critical of religion with Lucretius' poem De rerum natura. In the first part, I try to show how a brief review of modern scientific literature can assist to resolve one of the much discussed problems in Lucretian scholarship, namely the attitude of Lucretius towards traditional Graeco-Roman religion and the question of (in)coherence of his thought. In the second part, I change the perspective in order to show that, in some key aspects, Lucretius can be viewed as the precursor of contemporary critique of religion.