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Ancient and Modern

Peter Jones

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Peter Jones continues his look at the debate between creationists and anti-creationists

Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ theory of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5th-century Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Not that they set out to oppose the creationists; it was just that their understanding of the nature of the world led them, inevitably, to quite opposite conclusions.

The atomists hypothesised that minute, unsplittable atomoi, below the level of sense-perception, were the basic stuff out of which the world was made. These atomoi grouped themselves in various ways to produce the world we see around us. Since these atoms were infinite in number and randomly grouped, they produced infinite worlds of an infinite variety — among them ours. The brilliance of this hypothesis is its economy: atoms, moving around in a void, explain everything, without any need for pre-existing intelligence. This was welcomed by the Greek thinker Epicurus (341-270 bc), and his great Roman disciple Lucretius (100-55 bc), but firmly rejected by their opponents, the Stoics (founded by Zeno 335-263 bc). In the absence of typewriters and Shakespeare, they argued that a universe as providential as ours was as likely to emerge at random as an infinitely large collection of alphabetic letters, tipped randomly on the ground, would spell out the Annals of Ennius.

But the Epicureans were up to the challenge. Lucretius, for example, while not arguing for evolution in any sense, still saw that the principle of the ‘selection of the fittest’ would account for the apparent purposive structures of nature. So, randomly produced creatures without e.g. eyes would simply not survive, while mighty lions, cunning foxes and sheep useful to men (etc) would. Further, the atomic theory of matter did away with the idea of gods controlling human life, the key feature of Epicurean philosophy. Aristotle, no atomist, sat on the fence. His momentous innovation was to propose a deity who did not intervene in nature, either as creator or administrator. What drove nature was its own ‘natural’ propensities. Aristotle draws an analogy with craft: the builder builds a house, but it is the essential form of the house, deep in his soul, that gets the mechanical process going. So nature has essential forms imbued in it, which it cannot but mechanically reproduce.

A correction: David Sedley’s Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity is published by California UP, not Cambridge, as I wrote last week.

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