Lucretius vs Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins has been confusing his categories again, comparing Trinity College, Cambridge, with Islam. His attack on religion does precisely the same, as if the pre-scientific Biblical account of the world somehow disproves the whole religious phenomenon. The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 100–55 BC) had argued in this way long before Dawkins.

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In his great poem On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius built on earlier Greek thought to argue that the whole universe — mind and matter, body and soul, god and man, earth, sky, sun, moon and stars — was made up of atomic particles, below the level of perception, and to explain how it all worked. Further, the gods, made up of self-regenerating atoms, were serenely uninterested in us and our worries.