Lucretius-Underrated Epicurean Philosopher: He perceived the secrets of the universe by the brilliance of his intuition.by William Edelen
For over one thousand years the ignorance of Old Testament (biblical) cosmology dominated and was forced on us through the tyranny of the church. Greek and Roman scholars knew better, and years before Jesus was born they had brilliant insights into the nature of the universe. Eratosthenes, in the third century B.C., had even calculated the circumference of the Earth. The ancient Old Testament Hebrews still thought the Earth was flat. Hebrew belief, or mythology, was that the Earth was flat and covered by a huge dome called the "firmament." Those lights called Sun, Moon and Stars were suspended from the firmament. And deep in the bowels of the Earth, the basement so to speak, was Sheol, the home of the dead. So, since the Church Fathers had pronounced the writings of the Old Testament as the "Word of God," this primitive and ludicrous view of the Earth was forced on us, through the Christian Church, for more than a thousand years. Greek and Roman scholars, of course, laughed at these comical views of the Universe. Perhaps the most brilliant of all was Titus Lucretius Carus (circa 96-55 B.C.). He was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. His masterpiece, On The Nature of Things, is a philosophical poem and is regarded as one of the greatest and most brilliant ever written. As in the case of Copernicus, the Church's hatred was not turned upon Lucretius until after his death. The history of the Christian Church can be said to be a history of fighting losing battle after losing battle against truth, scholarship, and knowledge. It was Lucretius who, by sheer imaginative intuition, divided early human history into the Stone, Bronze and Iron ages. Contemporary anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology have shown that he was correct. And yet he had seen nothing of primal cultures or the origins of our species. The awesome intuition of Lucretius almost leaves one gasping. His insights were two thousand years ahead of Einstein and of quantum physics. There are no bounds in space or time, he said. In this universe without bounds, cosmic evolution, as well as biological, is a continuing process. Atoms are the stuff of the universe. There was and is no divine creator. Atoms were not created. They eternally are. It makes no more sense to ask how or when atoms came into being than to ask how a supernatural creator came into being. It makes no more sense to ask where did God come from? than to ask where did the first atom come from? Something cannot become nothing. If this were possible the world would have ceased to exist. The world does exist, therefore something has always existed and that something is atoms. They are eternal and indivisible and can neither be created nor destroyed. When George Santa-yana was Chair of the Philosophy Department at Harvard University, he made this observation:
Or, in the language of classical Hinduism, the dance of Shiva. While the authors of the Old Testament were still living on a flat earth, Greek and Roman thinkers and scholars were by sheer brilliant intuition seeing into the truth of the nature of things and would not be fooled. More William Edelen, sign on to AOL, go to Freethought Forum and browse our library. Table of Contents | 1995 Issues | Subscribe Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996 |