Uriel Dacosta was one of the foremost thinkers of the first half of the 17th century. With his tireless struggle against the religious ideology of the Middle Ages, he took a strong place in the history of atheism. The shrewd mind of a freethinker refuted the church doctrine of the inviolability and holiness of church dogmas, the immortality of the soul, and the inspiration of the Bible. Dacosta was not far, by his own statement, from denying god. He left behind four small works. Only one of them ("An Example of Human Life") reached us completely, the rest were destroyed by militant churchmen; only individual fragments of them have survived - mainly those that were reproduced in the polemical writings of the opponents of Dacosta.