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!
Thank you so much for all your insights, dearest sister in Christ, and for that fascinating article!
I had never really noticed Epicurus ...
Does this second paragraph you quoted begin to sound like Newton?