Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 30 August 2008

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

issue 30 August 2008

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.

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