Are scientists becoming the new priests?

In short, at no time before very recent times did people think human beings were "just" their physical bodies, just a bunch of chemicals, matter in its motions according to purely natural laws.

I would assert that the notion of "just their physical bodies" is simply a statement of materialism or physicalism which denies dualism. You would agree also. However I think it behoves us to look at the roots of this weltanschauung (all-emcompasing worldview) which takes us back 2400 years to ancient Greece. Although Darwinism is a far more familiar theory than Epicurean materialism, it is clear that Epicurus was the progenitor, in every sense, of Darwinism. Epicurus provided an approach to the study of nature-a paradigm as the historian of science - Thomas Kuhn called it - the systematic and purposeful exclusion of the divine from nature, not only in regards to the creation, but also in regard to divine control of, and intervention in, nature. The secularization culminated in Darwinism because it was with Darwin that materialism, which had been slowly but surely permeating and re-forming the predessor Christian culture, finally reached and devoured God the creator and the immortal soul, leaving in its wake a completely Godless, soulless universe.

Darwinists all too often hold to materialist principles even when their own science turns up startling evidence questioning those very materialist principles. This refusal to see what is before them is a priori, evidence of their own making, is what will allow intelligent design theorists question whether there is something else motivating the materialist scientists with whom they debate, something that makes them resist them mounting scientific evidence for a designer.

Epicurus was motivated to remain a steadfast materialist specifically with the goal in mind of driving the divine from the universe. A godless, soulless universe is one without judgements, without peril, one in which rather than our every thought and movement being watched by an omniscient diety whose claims for absolute justice are unremitting, we instead, is free of a brooding, unblinking divine eye. Epicurus' goal was to close that eye. That Darwin's evolutionary arguements are novel is a notion that is far from the truth. Modern evolutionary theory is not modern in the least. It is found full-blown the the first century B.C. in the Roman Epicurean poet-philosopher Lucretius and its rise was assured with the victory of materialism in the seventeenth century. Darwin is not the beginning of evolutionary theory but rather, the culmination. There is a full cosmological framework which Darwinism presupposes, and those presuppositions lead straight to the door of Epicurus.

Briefly, Epicurus believed that "freedom from disturbances" and "secure conviction" was the goal to reach for and defines his whole system. Ataraxia, freedom from disturbances" was the Epicurean goal of science. He deplored the notion of meterology (disturbances of the heavenly bodies, lightning, thunder, stars, comets, and even the gods were the greatest sources of those disturbances, and the second cause of those disturbances was concern of the afterlife. He sought to rid the universe of these disturbances. He did this by teaching that "everything was made up of atomos (a-tomos=not divisible) which could not be divided beyond these atomos. All matter, even the make up of the gods, were made of those same atomes. By making this assertion he simply stated he believed in materialism. It was a short walk from there to redefine gods, though immortal(in Greek mythology), were made of the same thing as everything else in the universe, thus removing fear of the divine, and thus the afterlife. He then asserted that everything which comes to be, is by random chance of those atomos, and asserted the philosophical principle that "nothing comes to be from nothing" affirming the Principle of Causality. This allowed Epicurus to assert that the universe did not exist ex nihlo but rather affired the eternality of the universe. With this proviso, Epicurus did away with the Creator of the universe. The shift of the eternality of the divine to the eternality of the universe fit well withing the paradign of Epicurus, and subsequently, Darwin. To put it another way, the faith in the existinence of eternal atoms defines both nature and science as essentially materialism. These eternal atomos make a creator God unnecessary. Epicurus essentially stated that the choice of worldview was between materialism and mythology. For Epicurus, the gods were rendered harmless, because they were part of nature, made of atoms, just like everything and everyone else in the universe. He referred to the gods as blessed animals (zoon aphtharton kai makarion) He classified them as animals because as indestructibility was the result of their being part of nature. If otherwise, the universe would not be reducible to atomos and the void.

So here is the seedstock of Darwinism - God does not exist as omnipotent - materialism is all that there is - the random movement of atoms come together by chance to produce animals, plants, gods, rocks,..not the creation of a designer creator God. There is nothing beyond death - just random momvement of atomos, thus releasing the "disturbances" of concerns of the afterlife.

Most people equate Epicureanism with hedonism, but Epicurus was an ascetic, saying "the greatest pleasure is the absence of pain", futher stating that this pleasure is at its zenith eating barley cake and water. However, regarding sexuality Epicurus stated that it was the result of the unnatural desire of ther body for unlimited pleasure. But,there were no intrinsically evil acts. He said, no pleasure is bad in itself. Because nothing is evil in and of itself he said 'we must emphasize any pleasure'. Nature has no 'intents' of placing a limit, moral or otherwise on itself. "Atomos, themselves, by their random motion, did not impose limits on our actions and desires; such limits and the pain that reinforces them were only the result of chance."

So,(fast forward 2400 years) the true test of the merit of a hypothesis is that it passes the test of nature. Is nature really as Epicurus describes, or does nature simply shoe-horn itself in on an acient theory revived by Darwin, and today conform to the materialism of today. This type of faith in materialism can become bad faith, if, upon examination, it ceases to work. But, a good working hypothesis can be adjusted around the edges without being fatal to the theory. But after probing deeply into nature,..after science contradicts the theory, when we find adherance to a failing theory of evolution, we simply assert that Darvinianism is not 'bad faith'....it is enough to affirm that it is their faith.

My greatest concern is that the 'keepers of the culture' are completely entrenched in buisness, universities, public educaiton, and media. Their efficacy to suppress and ridicule intelligent design and the creator is entrenched and is moral in origin.

Epicurus was motivated to remain a steadfast materialist specifically with the goal in mind of driving the divine from the universe. A godless, soulless universe is one without judgements, without peril, one in which rather than our every thought and movement being watched by an omniscient diety whose claims for absolute justice are unremitting, we instead, is free of a brooding, unblinking divine eye. Epicurus' goal was to close that eye. That Darwin's evolutionary arguements are novel is a notion that is far from the truth. It is found full-blown the the first century B.C. in the Roman Epicurean poet-philosopher Lucretius and its rise was assured with the victory of materialism in the seventeenth century. Darwin is not the beginning of evolutionary theory but rather, the culmination.

Outstanding insights, Texas Songwriter! Thank you ever so much for this excellent discussion of Epicurus' relentless materialism and its Darwinian modern development.

Heaven forfend that there should be divine judgment! This is an idea too scary for human beings to live with. Funny thing is, Epicurus believed in "the gods"; he just maintained that they aren't the least bit interested in human beings, and for them to be involved with humans in any way would disturb their "beatitude." And according to Epicurus, they would wish to avoid this.

Point is, no gods, no "judgment" to worry about. This innovation is a stark departure from Plato's view of divine judgment — Dike — as inescapable for man, who continues to exist even after death and is subject to judgment (and more than likely, punishment) for the manner in which he lived his life.

Of course, if there's no god, there's no basis for "objective" morality. Epicurus' morality is entirely premised on (subjective) sense perception as the touchstone of truth. The report of our senses tells us that we should avoid pain and pursue pleasure. And that, in effect, becomes the "new and improved" moral law.

Epicurus believed that, on the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul's survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife. He regarded the unacknowledged fear of death and punishment as the primary cause of anxiety among human beings, and anxiety in turn as the source of extreme and irrational desires. The elimination of the fears and corresponding desires would leave people free to pursue the pleasures, both physical and mental, to which they are naturally drawn, and to enjoy the peace of mind that is consequent upon their regularly expected and achieved satisfaction....

[Epicurus' "proof" of the non-existence of life after death:] Death, Epicurus insists, is nothing to us, since while we exist, our death is not, and when our death occurs, we do not exist. — David Konstan

So it's literally senseless to worry about it! We can't be judged if we are no longer around, i.e., don't exist, post-death. Ta-Da!!! Takes care of that problem!

Another interesting aspect of Epicurean philosophy is that the soul is reckoned to exist. After all, Epicurus needed something to explain the obvious fact that men are conscious, that they have minds. But Epicurus' "soul" is just a finer material body than the physical body in which it resides. That is, it is also composed of material "atoms"; but they are finer than the atoms that compose the physical body. At death, the soul's atoms scatter, just as the physical atoms do. Strangely (to us), Epicurus physically locates man's soul, the rational mind, in his chest.

The important thing is even the soul is "material." Kinda reminds me of Stephen Pinker's claim that all human moral action is really dictated by chemical processes occurring in the brain....

I guess there's "nothing new under the sun."

TS, you wrote that your greatest concern is that the "keepers of the culture" — who are completely entrenched in business, universities, public education, and media — are Epicurean/Darwinian materialists. You correctly note (IMHO) that their success in ridiculing and suppressing intelligent design and the creator is entrenched and is moral in origin.

Yet with God "gone," man is reduced to the status of a clever animal. With God "gone," man can't even explain himself. The dirty little secret of these "keepers of the culture" is that they detest, not only God, but man himself....

But of course, we can't call these people "immoral" because they don't believe in morality.... :^)

Talk about a clash of worldviews, which is at the bottom of the so-called "culture war" — which is definitely coming to a head in our lifetime....

Or so it seems to me. FWIW

Be of good cheer, my friend! God cannot be "erased" because disordered men wish to erase Him.... And last time I checked, He was still in charge....

Thank you so very much for your excellent essay/post, dear brother in Christ!

Thank you both, oh so very much, for your outstanding and informative essay-posts on the subject of Epicurus, Darwin and metaphysical naturalism!

I'm thoroughly enjoying being a spectator to your conversation, and would like to offer another insight from Justin Martyr from fragments of his lost work on the Resurrection.

Chapter VI.—The resurrection consistent with the opinions of the philosophers.

Those, then, who are called natural philosophers, say, some of them, as Plato, that the universe is matter and God; others, as Epicurus, that it is atoms and the void; others, like the Stoics, that it is these four—fire, water, air, earth. For it is sufficient to mention the most prevalent opinions.

And Plato says that all things are made from matter by God, and according to His design; but Epicures and his followers say that all things are made from the atom and the void by some kind of self-regulating action of the natural movement of the bodies; and the Stoics, that all are made of the four elements, God pervading them.

But while there is such discrepancy among them, there are some doctrines acknowledged by them all in common, one of which is that neither can anything be produced from what is not in being, nor anything be destroyed or dissolved into what has not any being, and that the elements exist indestructible out of which all things are generated. And this being so, the regeneration of the flesh will, according to all these philosophers, appear to be possible.

For if, according to Plato, it is matter and God, both these are indestructible and God; and God indeed occupies the position of an artificer, to wit, a potter; and matter occupies the place of clay or wax, or some such thing. That, then, which is formed of matter, be it an image or a statue, is destructible; but the matter itself is indestructible, such as clay or wax, or any other such kind of matter. Thus the artist designs in the clay or wax, and makes the form of a living animal; and again, if his handiwork be destroyed, it is not impossible for him to make the same form, by working up the same material, and fashioning it anew. So that, according to Plato, neither will it be impossible for God, who is Himself indestructible, and has also indestructible material, even after that which has been first formed of it has been destroyed, to make it anew again, and to make the same form just as it was before.

But according to the Stoics even, the body being produced by the mixture of the four elementary substances, when this body has been dissolved into the four elements, these remaining indestructible, it is possible that they receive a second time the same fusion and composition, from God pervading them, and so re-make the body which they formerly made. Like as if a man shall make a composition of gold and silver, and brass and tin, and then shall wish to dissolve it again, so that each element exist separately, having again mixed them, he may, if he pleases, make the very same composition as he had formerly made.

Again, according to Epicurus, the atoms and the void being indestructible, it is by a definite arrangement and adjustment of the atoms as they come together, that both all other formations are produced, and the body itself; and it being in course of time dissolved, is dissolved again into those atoms from which it was also produced. And as these remain indestructible, it is not at all impossible, that by coming together again, and receiving the same arrangement and position, they should make a body of like nature to what was formerly produced by them; as if a jeweller should make in mosaic the form of an animal, and the stones should be scattered by time or by the man himself who made them, he having still in his possession the scattered stones, may gather them together again, and having gathered, may dispose them in the same way, and make the same form of an animal.

And shall not God be able to collect again the decomposed members of the flesh, and make the same body as was formerly produced by Him?

Epicurus of course does not admit God in his philosophy (Justin Martyr speaks of it in chapter IV) but the description of his philosophy by Martyr reads like a precursor to thermodynamics, self-organizing complexity, cellular automata and chaos theory. LOLOL!

Truly, there is nothing new under the son. LOLOL!

God's Name is I AM.

It does indeed!

I imagine Epicurus was largely reacting against Plato and Aristotle: Broadly speaking, both saw the Cosmos as the outcome of relations between God and matter....

Epicurus held that the elementary constituents of nature are undifferentiated matter, in the form of discrete, solid and indivisible particles (“atoms”) below the threshold of perception, plus empty space.... ... a strict conception of minimal-sized atoms entails that motion too must consist of discontinuous quanta; and if motion, then time. Atoms must, then, Aristotle inferred, move in discrete hops (kinêmata), each one occupying a single temporal minimum — and hence, all atoms must move at a uniform speed. An infinite void, with atoms distributed throughout it, led to problems of its own, for it permits no intrinsic spatial orientation and hence no account of why things fall, as they are observed to do.

Oh how modern Epicurus sounds! Check this out:

But [Epicurus' theory] also provided a solution to another problem, that of entropy: for since atoms can never slow down [as Epicurus maintained], the universe can never come to a halt (in modern terms, there is no loss of energy). As for gravity, Epicurus may have had a solution to this too, and in a novel form. If an atom just on its own cannot slow down or alter its direction of motion, then an atom that is rising or moving in an oblique direction cannot at some point begin to tilt or fall, unless something blocks its progress and forces it to do so. If, however, after a collision atoms tended to emerge in a statistically favored direction — that is, if the motions of all atoms after collisions did not cancel each other out but on average produced a vector, however small, in a given direction, then that direction would by definition be down. The absence of a global orientation in the universe was thus immaterial. Due to this vector, any given world will, like our own, be similarly oriented in respect to gravitation. (Given the infinite expanse of the universe on Epicurean theory ... we must expect there to be a plurality of worlds, some like ours, some — within limits — different.)

[The above passages are from David Konstan's article, "Epicurus," appearing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

Indeed, dearest sister in Christ, it appears there's "nothing new under the sun." That might be because mankind continually works on the same critical problems....

To God be the glory!

Thank you ever so much for posting the excerpt from Justin Martyr — and for your thought-provoking essay/post!

Does this second paragraph you quoted begin to sound like Newton?

Yep. It surely does. And also of statistically-based quantum mechanics. And yet we enlightened post-moderns suppose we invented all the "good stuff" of modern science....

Speaking of quantum theory, I have the eerie feeling that Plato may have anticipated the "problems" we moderns have understanding the quantum world, and did so in the fourth century B.C.

Plato has a "creation myth": the Myth of the Demiurge. Standard dictionaries define "demiurge" as "the creator of the universe." But I'm not sure I can read Plato that way. His demiurge seems to be not God, who is totally Beyond the Cosmos (and thus utterly beyond the reach of the microcosm, Man), but an active agency of this God.

The Demiurge works to bring Chora into Form. So what is this "Chora?" And what is this "Form?" And how does the Demiurge do this?

For Plato, the idea of Chora blends two fundamental "ingredients" of the Cosmos: (1) It is infinite pure potentiality [unorganized matter, a/k/a chaos] having the basic character of uniform, atom-like matter. (2) The operations the Demiurge performs WRT Chora necessarily entail the concept of "space."

In effect, Chora is a random sea of possibilities that is ill-disposed to "become" anything. Left to itself, it has no notion of "form" anyway. But "form" is necessary as the specification of an existent being of whatever kind.

The basic ideas here are: Nothing comes into being from nothing. And unformed Chora is precisely "no-thing," so long as it resists being "persuaded" into form. In order for forms to be realized, there must be space in which they can exist. Otherwise, they remain "unrealized."

Thus Plato's idea of "space" isn't the notional "space" we humans experience with our views of a "dark and endless" night sky, bejeweled with myriads upon myraids upon myriads, etc., of lights.

Plato's concept of "space" is simply the space that it takes for a form to be realized as an actually existent part and participant of the Cosmos.

This supports the idea that space (and time) are not absolutely fixed things, but are eternally created things. In universal evolution, seemingly space "expands"; thus likely also does Time — if indeed they have been unified, as Einstein maintains.

The beautiful thing about Plato's myth is that the agency that draws Chora into form does so, not by "divine edict," but by means of persuasion (peitho). The Demiurge creates (by persuasion) in the very image of the God Beyond — who is truth and beauty and justice, and desires his creatures to be partners in his truth and beauty and justice as existential participants in his own eternal being.

Plato is certainly no determinist!!!

Anyhoot, I am wondering whether there may be insights here of relevance to quantum theorists, WRT the role/significance of "the observer"....

Thank you ever so much for writing, dear TS!

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