Atheism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism? Does this mean that religion is on the way out?
This thinking is shallow and fallacious. The Protestant Reformation was the first quintessentially modern movement. That it stopped developing in the era of the Enlightenment notwithstanding.
Atheism was a sideshow in the Enlightenment beginning to modernity. Atheism is forever turning into a cult for cranks, as with the New Atheists.
Further it has been mixed with a metaphysics of scientism and Darwinism that has corrupted it, and will discredit it.
Atheism is far more ancient than Axial monotheism and was the original matrix of much primordial religion. But it was not atheism as now peddled by the likes of Dawkins, who has made it hard for many atheists to use that term.
The point here is that Axial monotheism may well come to an end, but the possible substitution of ‘atheism’ in its current cult brand would be a cultural calamity of Social Darwinist Nietzscheans and nihilist culture criminals. The ‘atheism’ of Buddhism, which it inherited from greater antiquity was not the silly form we now see, and was barely either theistic or atheistic.
We can go on and on here, but the strange reality is that New Atheism is ironically discrediting atheism.
One very ancient related view here was agnostic polytheism, with an agnosticism about ‘god’, a belief in polytheism, but a mistrust of such divinities, with an insistance on freeing religion from exploitation by same divinities. Remains of these views (in some ways upgraded) are visible in the recycled brand known as Buddhism which is almost closer to us than primordial Shaivism/Jainism.