This declaration was made by someone calling himself William Hammon, introducing a pamphlet called Answer to Dr Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, Part I (1782). An unpacking of some of its context will help to set out the terms on which an ‘atheism debate’ was initiated in Britain in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. First, its authorship: the otherwise unidentified ‘Hammon’ claims to be merely the editor of the main body of the pamphlet, whose anonymous author was subsequently identified as Matthew Turner, a ‘physician at Liverpool: among his friends a professed Atheist’. The situation of a respectable figure known personally as an atheist but unable to put their name to such views in print is one we shall encounter again repeatedly. The murkiness surrounding ‘Hammon’ – whether a pseudonym for Turner or the real (or indeed false) name of someone else publishing his views as a partial cover for their own – is also of a piece with the often crooked routes through which atheist ideas gradually came to be aired at this time.