Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity

V / The Atomists

V The Atomists 1. democritus So far in our story the creationists have made all the running, culminating in Plato’s Timaeus, the ultimate creationist manifesto. Even if one faction of Plato’s heirs insisted that he had never meant to say that a discrete act of divine creation had ever taken place, this dialogue’s impact on such thinkers as Aristotle,Epicurus,the Stoics,and Galen,with whom my remaining chapters will be mainly concerned, was never diluted or mediated by any such interpretative ploy. They all regarded it as creationist in the literal sense— that is, as describing the world’s origin in an intelligent creative act. And they responded accordingly. In this chapter I turn to the atomist tradition. Epicurus (341–271 b.c.) is for us its most prominent representative, and he was writing at a date when the Timaeus, scarcely a generation old, was dominating discussions. But our story must start a century earlier, with the founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus. They were among the truly seminal philosophers working at the end of the Presocratic era in the late fifth century b.c. Although Leucippus, the older of the two, is credited with founding the movement,it is Democritus,a much more voluminous and influential writer, who will be our focus here. Early in chapter I, I advertised atomism as the first Presocratic philosophy to eliminate intelligent causation at the primary level. Instead of making intelligence either an irreducible feature of matter, or, with Anaxagoras, a discrete power acting upon matter, early Greek atomism treats atoms and void alone as the primary realities, and relegates intelligence to a secondary status: intelligence, along with color, flavor, and innumerable other attributes, is among the properties that supervene on complex structures 133 of atoms and void. The atoms themselves are inanimate particles and the void their negative counterpart, possessing only material properties such as size, shape, location, and density. Once atoms have formed a world and its contents, intelligent organisms may well be generated out of these. But it is inconceivable that any world might itself be the product of a preexisting intelligence. It should be obvious that the fundamental pattern of causality envisaged here is one which can find innumerable proponents and sympathizers today. In the hands of Democritus’s eventual heir Epicurus, atomism was to become a vital weapon against divine creation,as we shall shortly see.Belief in divine creation brings with it, according to Epicurus, intolerable religious consequences, compelling us to assume that our own lives are under divine surveillance, and to live in terror of the threats this poses. To recognize the truth of atomism, in Epicurus’s eyes, has the incalculable merit of freeing us from those consequences by permitting us to account for the world and its contents as the products of mere accident, freed from the specter of divine control. But was early atomism in its original context, at the end of the fifth century b.c., already motivated by such religious concerns? The chronology would make the hypothesis inherently credible.As emerged in my first three chapters, by the late fifth century there were in the public arena not only the scientific brands of creationism developed by Anaxagoras and Empedocles , but also, more pertinently, the anti-scientific creationism of Socrates, aimed precisely at confirming mankind’s utter indebtedness to divinity and the religious obligations imposed by that recognition. The emergence of atomist materialism would make immediate sense as a response to this Socratic theology. But it is remarkably hard to unearth evidence for any such story.1 One obstacle to it is that Democritus himself apparently did,within the constraints of his atomism, admit a role for divine beings prone to harm as well as to benefit us, and was later duly criticized by the Epicureans for making the concession.2 Nor is there any particular reason to assume that Democritus— let alone his predecessor Leucippus—was familiar with the radical ideas of his contemporary Socrates. Socrates published nothing.True, Socrates had a high public profile on the streets of Athens as a philosophical disputant, but 134 / V. The Atomists 1. Nor is 68 B 5 DK, the story of Democritus’s hostility to Anaxagoras over “the cosmic ordering and nous,” in itself evidence that this disagreement had a specifically religious motivation. 2. See C.C. W. Taylor 1999, pp. 211–16. [18.191.234.191] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...