a more rational view of religion. He was very critical of religious people privileging their belief system over others without sound reason. Socrates' conception of the divine was that the gods were always benevolent, truthful, authoritative, and wise. Divinity was to operate within the standards of rationality. This critique of established religion ultimately resulted in his trial for impiety and corruption as documented in The Apology. The historian Will Durant writes that Plato was "as skeptical of atheism as of any other dogma." Democritus was the father of materialism in the West, and there is no trace of a belief in any afterlife in his work. Specifically, in Those in Hades he refers to constituents of the soul as atoms that dissolve upon death. 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. 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. In De Natura Deorum the Academic Skeptic philosopher Cicero presented arguments against the Stoics calling into question the character of the gods, whether or not they participate in earthly affairs, and questions their existence. 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. A forerunner to the Charvaka school, philosopher Ajita Kesakambali, did not believe in reincarnation. Early modern history Thomas Hobbes took positions that strongly disagreed with orthodox Christian teachings. He argued repeatedly that there are no incorporeal substances, and that all things, even God, heaven, and hell are corporeal, matter in motion. He argued that "though Scripture acknowledge spirits, yet doth it nowhere say, that they are incorporeal, meaning thereby without dimensions and quantity". Voltaire, although himself a deist, was a forceful critic of religion and advocated for acceptance of all religions as well as separation of church and state. In Japan, Yamagata Bantō (d.1821) declared that "in this world there are no gods, Buddhas, or ghosts, nor are there strange or miraculous things". Modern religious skepticism The term has morphed into one that typically emphasizes scientific and historical methods of evidence. There are some skeptics that question whether religion is a viable topic