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Epicurus Today

Episode 260 - The Universe Is Infinite And Eternal And Has No Gods Over It

Date: 12/18/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4189-episode-260-the-universe-is-infinite-and-eternal-and-has-no-gods-over-it/

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Transcript

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Cassius: Welcome to episode 260 of Lucretius today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean texts and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in a series of episodes devoted to central doctrines of Epicurus. Last week we discussed nothing comes from nothing which lucretius lists as the starting point of epicurean physics. We also spent a significant amount of time last week discussing the process of deductive reasoning by which you derive the principle that nothing comes from nothing and then apply it to additional items of physics source to reach additional conclusions. Today we are going to move to the ultimate conclusion of epicurean physics. We’ve entitled The episode of the Universe is infinite and eternal and has no supernatural forces over it, but the real key is that Epicurus deduced that the universe is entirely natural and that if something exists at all, then it is part of nature and that there is nothing outside of nature now that comes into play when you start talking about whether the universe had a beginning, whether there was something before the universe and that that thing could be God or whether there’s something past the universe in distance that the universe has an end in some way and then outside the universe there could be a place where some supernatural force exists. We’re not going to approach today’s discussion as if we are astrophysicists, which we certainly are not, but our goal is going to be to bring Epic’s perspective into play so that we can decide how it affects the conclusions and the presumptions that we have to make as we live from day to day. Now, one thing I’d like to make clear before we get started is it’s important to understand that depending on your perspective, your training, the word universe can have different meanings to different people. It has become popular in recent decades to discuss things like multiverses and other dimensions and other things that have deviated from the traditional use of the word universe, which was that when somebody discussed the universe, they meant everything that exists and that if it exists anywhere in any form, it is part of the universe. Now, that term can be confusing to people who are now used to talking about multiverses and other dimensions and the big Bang theory and other types of theories that imply that there are multiple universes, and we’re going to be discussing the universe today primarily in the traditional sense, the dictionary definition, which is that the universe is the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena throughout space, the cosmos, the macrocosm. In other words, universe in our generic way of talking about it means everything. So for all of those who hear universe and say, you’re wrong, there are multiple universes, there’s multiverses, there’s all sorts of things. We’re using the term in the philosophic sense of everything, and if it exists in whatever label you wish to put into it, then it exists as part of the universe from that traditional perspective and just as we discussed last week, even though issues of physics can be very dry and unappealing for people who are concerned about their moment to moment lives, it’s important to understand a basic view of the universe so that you can place yourself in a proper perspective. There was a time when people thought that the earth was the center of the universe and that we were specially privileged beings the focus of God’s attention and that we were everything that was important in the universe. On the other hand, there is also a perspective in which the universe is so gigantic that we as individuals are so tiny within it that we are absolutely insignificant without any merit or without any substance or reason to be considered whatsoever and people can tend to boom orang between those two positions. We are cells of the center of the universe. On the other hand, we ourselves are absolutely nothing and not worth even thinking about because we’re so insignificant. One of the things I think we’re going to find as we review Epicurus viewpoint is that there is a better way to look at that, that acknowledges that indeed we are important to ourselves while not thinking that we are specially privileged by the universe to be the center of attention, and that both perspectives can be understood and integrated in a way that allows us to live happily without being overwhelmed by the size of the universe or inflated in self-importance by placing ourselves falsely at the center of it. So a proper understanding of the universe is foundational to epic’s approach to philosophy. We have, for example, principle doctrine number 11, if we were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about death, fearing that it concerns us and also by our failure to grasp the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science, and of course that’s phrased in a way that epicurus often does by pointing out that we are troubled by those things and so therefore we do have need of natural science in order to get rid of our troubles and suspicions that are not necessary to be concerned about. Principle doctrine number 12 says, a man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe, but suspects the truth of some mythical story so that without natural science it is not possible to attain our pleasure’s aloid. And while some people will argue that, well, these physics are not necessary for me to understand because I don’t have these concerns and so therefore why should I bother with them? Well, Epicurus is making the point that ultimately you can’t expect to live for long without coming into contact with these concerns and that the best way to deal with them therefore is to be prepared for them and have an understanding so that you can hope to achieve your pleasures andoid and avoid unnecessary concerns that are definitely going to come your way at some point even if they’re not confronting you now. So today we’re going to tackle the question of whether the universe had a beginning in time and has an ending in space and go over some of Epicurus positions about that. The last thing I’d quote before we go further from Lucious book five, around line 1194, this is a very good summary and worth remembering about the significance of this issue because Lucretia says this quote, a unhappy race of men when it has assigned such acts to the gods and join there with bitter anger. What groaning did they beget for themselves? What soars for us? What tears for our children to come? Nor is it piety at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone and to draw near to every altar, no nor to lie, prostrate on the ground with outstretched palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the streaming blood of beast nor link vow to vow, but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest. For indeed, when we look up at the heavenly quarters of the great world and the firm set ether above the twinkling stars and it comes to our mind to think of the journeying of sun and moon, then into our heart weighed down with other ills, this misgiving too begins to raise up its wakened head that there may be per chance some immeasurable power of the gods over us, which whirls on the bright stars in their diverse motions for lack of reasoning, a sails our mind with doubt whether there was any creation and beginning of the world. And again, whether there is an end until which the walls of the world may be able to endure this weariness of restless motion or whether gifted by the god’s will with an everlasting being, they may be able to glide on down the everlasting groove of time and set at not the mighty strength of Measureless time. The point being that lack of understanding will assail our minds with doubt about whether the world had a beginning or not. That’s a natural question that arises in most every human being’s experience. Maybe there are some people that it hasn’t bothered, but the great majority of people are concerned. Did the universe have a beginning? Was God there before the beginning? Does the universe have a limit in space? Is that where God lives outside the universe? And as long as you have those doubts that there’s a place for a supernatural being in your universe, it’s going to cause concern. And so Epicurus decided to deal with that and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.

Joshua: You’ve raised a lot of good points as we start out today, Cassius, I think one of the interesting ones that you raised is this question of the meaning of the word universe, and one of the things that I didn’t really understand until I had read DeWitt’s book was the shades of difference in meaning between universe and cosmos. Cosmos, it turns out is not merely another word for universe, but it is the universe considered as a well-ordered whole. The reason this is important is because in Greek mythology, everything that exists starts in chaos. This is the original state and cosmos or order is something that is applied to chaos in order to make a universe possible to live in. For epicurus, the universe has always been a cosmos. It has always been well ordered and it has been well ordered in part because there are boundaries not at the edge of the universe. There is no edge, not in time because there are no boundaries in time either, but because the things that exist in the universe have these boundaries, and the term that lucious uses is the deep set boundaries, stone, Alta Termina, Iran, and one of those boundaries, and we didn’t talk about this last week during our discussion of the atoms, is the atoms have properties and those properties are shape, weight, and size. So in the context of these boundaries, you can’t have an atom the size of a house as Lucrecia says, because if you did, we could see them and we don’t see them. So it is partially because the atoms have these unchanging properties that we can predict that behavior elsewhere in the universe is the same as it is here on earth. This was the innovation of the adamus was to predict that the rules governing what we poetically refer to as the heavens, they’re the same rules that govern the behavior of bodies and space on earth. So the things that are within our experience here on earth, we can project that out into the cosmos because we can predict that the rules will be the same because the cosmos is well ordered and because the atoms have to follow these certain rules, the speed of atomic motion is uniform. There is a lower bound to the size of the smallest atoms, and there is an upper bound to the size of the atoms, and that’s true not just on earth, but everywhere. It also occurs to me to say that in the context of a discussion about the universe, we have to deal with Epicurus discussion of worlds. I think just a little bit, as you said in your introduction, Cassius is not thinking of a multiverse. What he’s thinking about is one contiguous infinite space or void, but suspended in that void. In that space, there are particular congregations of atoms like the ones that we see in our experience, the ground that we’re walking on, the air that we breathe, the stars overhead and the planets overhead, and we know because again, the universe can be predicted in that way because it has these certain basic rules that if we go a trillion light years in any given direction, we’re going to come to another world eventually. The Epicurus word for this was cosmo. These cosmo are not separate dimensions or universes, but they are separate congregations of atoms in different parts of space. It’s important to mention this mostly because when we talk about there being many worlds in the context of Epicureanism, that is a very different discussion to the context of modern physics, and that’s a point that you made in your introduction, Cassius, and we probably don’t need to go on too long about it, but everywhere you go, it’s Adams and void in nature. The title of Lucius’s poem is Day Ray Room. Naura Ray Room is an inflection of res RES and res simply means a thing, an object that exists in nature. That’s what race is. And so his poem is about the nature of these objects, and you can have these objects in the form of compound bodies like the table in front of me, but always reducible to a minimum point at the level of the atom. And again, because for Epicurus, the universe is a well ordered whole and not chaos, we know that that same rule applies elsewhere in nature as well. And so when we see in the opening of Book one, this image of Epicurus, this very poetic image of epicurus climbing over the flaming ramparts of the world and breaking nature’s hold asunder as it’s poetically put by lucretius, he’s talking about the ability to notice what’s going on on earth and to project with your mind that behavior out elsewhere into the cosmos. It involves prediction, it involves identifying patterns. It is not prophetic, and it does not require us to travel to other parts of the universe because the universe is a well-ordered whole, and so what we observe on earth, we expect to find very similar kinds of things elsewhere in nature. I think that’s the main point of what I’m trying to get across here. As we begin, there are rules for the atoms. The speed of atomic motion is uniform. The atoms have three properties. These are the unchanging properties, but there are also things that change about the atoms like their position and on the cosmic level, the level of the universe itself, it also has rules, and those rules are, it is infinite in extent, the number of the atoms is infinite, and the age of the universe is eternal in both directions. So if we go a trillion years back in time, we might not find the same congregation of atoms in this particular part of space that we’re in, but we will find similar behavior then as we find now. That’s the upshot of a universe that is predictable, that is orderly, and that follows these basic rules about the motion and size and weight of the atoms and the extent of the void through which they flow.

Cassius: Yeah. Joshua, let me comment on a couple of the issues that you’ve brought up there today because I think that’s a good introduction to it and it’s something we’ve discussed fairly regularly, especially with our friend Don on the forum starting out with this question of what a world is in epicurean terminology, if I recall this correctly, a lot of us at this point are thinking that what Epicurus means when he says a world is he’s including basically when you look up at the sky or look around you, everything that you can see is part of our world, and that’s not very hard to understand in terms of the earth being part of our world, but the issue becomes, well, when you look out at the stars, are those stars part of our world or not? And it seems like when I’ve been reading the commentators, they mostly come to the conclusion that yes, Epicurus did not know exactly what those stars were, but he knew he could see them, and so he was considering everything that we can see including the sun, the moon, the stars above as part of our world. Now, that has an interesting application because especially in Lucretius, Epicurus thought that our world could come to an end that the current arrangement of the atoms in our world such as the Earth could and in fact will end up at some point in the hopefully distant future being destroyed. So even though Epicurus was not projecting multiverses and so forth, Epicurus was talking in terms of there being multiple worlds and our world only being one of the existing worlds, and if you equate world with a system in which our earth and the stars are included, then Epicurus was talking about there being multiple collections of planets, suns, stars, almost like we think of as a galaxy or something similar at a huge scale. In other words, epicures knew that the things that we see around us having come together at some point into their current form will eventually break apart from their current forms. And so that’s one reason why I would not recommend that any epicurean get too wedded to big bang, steady state, whatever the latest theories are, because all that Epicurus really knows is that the things he can see have a certain set of properties that go along with them. Now, you also mentioned that we would expect that the things in other worlds would have a relationship to the things that we see here in this world, and I think that’s correct. Epicurus also said that there’s life on other worlds that some life will be like ours and some will not be like ours. Some planets, some worlds will be like ours and some will not be like ours. So it gets really interesting as to what exactly we can predict about the nature of other worlds given our own world. That’s an issue that Philas explores in his book on signs or on methods of inference because that’s where you end up with that logical question of to what extent can you expect other things that you do not know to reflect or be similar to the things that you do know? And of course, that’s one of the biggest questions of all it concerns atoms. We can’t see or touch atoms, but we can deduce certain things about them. We can’t see or touch these other worlds, but we’re deducing certain things about them, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that Epicurus was taking the position that just because water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit in our world, that means it’s always going to freeze at that level in another world, just like here, the boiling or freezing point of water I think can be affected by pressure and other circumstances that are involved. And Epicurus is not an astrophysicist to the point of making predictions about the specific natures of other worlds. He’s not so narrow minded as to think that every planet is going to be exactly like the earth. On the other hand, this principle of infinity, that is part of what we’re talking about today, that the universe has no boundaries in space or in time for that matter, that in an infinite universe you are going to have exact repetition in addition to repetition that’s slightly different and then variations that are very different. So again, Epicurus is bringing to bear on questions of natural science, a logical approach that starts with the evidence that we have available to us and then takes that evidence and projects it in a reasonable way to make predictions about things that we cannot see. Importantly, also remembering that there are limits to what we can project. For example, in terms of the nature of the stars, we are limited in the information we have and so therefore we have to accept that there are multiple possibilities that can explain what is going on and not arbitrarily get attached to a single explanation when we don’t have enough evidence to say that the single explanation is the only thing that can occur. What we can deduce from atom will help us be confident that everything is ultimately reducible to atoms, but he’s not going to tell us for sure that some particular configuration of atoms is impossible on all worlds. The main point is that our observation teaches us that everything is composed of atoms and void. Everything that exists has a natural basis in atoms and void. We haven’t seen every combination of things that could exist and that can exist, but if it exists, it is a combination of atoms and void. This can be looked upon as a parallel between pleasure and pain. Epicurus takes the position that if you have pleasure, you do not have pain and vice versa. That’s what’s going on with the atoms and the void as well. If you’re talking about any aspect of existence, it is made up of either atoms or void. If you look at any aspect of life in a human context, it is made up of either pleasure or pain. This perspective gives you a way to analyze everything that is going on around you in that if indeed it exists, then it is part of nature. It is atoms and void. If in fact you are conscious of anything at all than what you are feeling is either pleasure or pain. Epicurus is taking a very high level logical approach to both of these two topics. If you step back and think about it, Epicurus is not discussing the particular characteristics of a particular atom. He’s not attempting to describe in exact detail in Adam other than in the most general of terms, the same thing’s going on with pleasure and pain. He’s not telling you what experience of pleasure in life you should choose specifically because they’re basically innumerable. What he’s telling you is that you can understand the choices in front of you, just like you can understand the nature of the universe by realizing that they fit into broad categories. The categories that comprise the universe are atoms and void. The categories that comprise human life are pleasure and pain. The individual atoms and the individual pleasures have to be examined and chosen uniquely and separately. But as a philosophical matter, you can understand the process of what you’re doing moment by moment in life by thinking about this big picture that comes from Adams and void or pleasure and pain as the paradigms through which you’re analyzing the picture so that you can understand it and make intelligent decisions about it. Now, getting back to the raw physics again, Francis writes a few days in Athens, she has her epicures say that he would not rule out the possibility of there being some powerful entity that could create a world or destroy a world, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean that that entity would be supernatural if the entity exists. If it is something that can come into contact with us, then it has a nature in irreducible atoms and void just like we do.

Joshua: Yeah, and this entity could not create the atoms to make the world even be using leftover materials from things that already exist to make said world. I think the point that our world will one day come to an end is an important one, and I think the Roman poet Avid clearly understood this because he pays lucious just about the highest compliment that an epicurean poet can receive, and that compliment was this, the verses of the sublime lucious will perish only when a single day shall consign the world to destruction. So it does suggest that this was something known not merely to the Epicureans, but it was known to others people who read them that this was an opinion that they held, that the atoms and the void are eternal uncreated and will exist forever, but the compound bodies that the atoms come together to produce will eventually fall apart and then the atoms will be recycled into new compound bodies. This is partially where we get the idea of nature as a generative mother. This continual recycling, this fertile recycling of material to produce new and interesting forms is a key understanding of how Lucious viewed this, and this is why he uses I think, less sterile terms than in some ways Epicurus himself does. When lucious refers to first beginnings and the seeds of things, we talked about that at length last week.

Cassius: That’s right, we did. And you’ve mentioned how the world will come to an end at some point, and the letter to HERIs talks about how Epicurus thought that the world had a beginning in the sense of coming together from the atoms that compose it. One of the references that would support that would be, as we know Epicurus hell, that all things happen from one of three different categories. We have some control over it. It’s accidental or it happens by necessity. When he describes how things happen by necessity, he talks about in the letter to Ous how those things that are of necessity were set in motion at the original formation of the world that’s found that the letter to Tus section 77 where Epicure says, therefore, we must believe that it is due to the original inclusion of matter in such agglomerations during the birth process of the world that this law of regular succession is also brought about. So Epicures talks clearly about formation of worlds, meaning that they form, they have their lifespans and they eventually dissolve just like everything that comes together. As you’ve just said, if any set of atoms comes together to form a body, it is our general experience that that body will eventually break apart into its constituent atoms. Now, not to get off onto the Gods issue again, but that’s one of the very interesting things about the issue of epicurean gods is that Epicurus had to deal with this general rule that if something comes together into the form of a body, it eventually breaks apart. Well, in the case of the Gods, he resolved that problem by deducing that the Gods must have a way of sustaining their bodies indefinitely by replacing their atoms, and that’s how he explains how a living being could live essentially deathless because you replace your atoms and reform them and keep them in the form that allows you to survive. But in general, Epicurus is taking a position that I think is very consistent with what most modern scientists take, that the universe is constantly changing its form, and that our world, whether you want to call that a galaxy or our part of the universe or whatever, is constantly changing and will eventually break apart, but it won’t break apart into nothing. It will break apart into its constituent elements which will then serve as the basis for forming a new universe. Just as in our world when a living being dies, its Adams return to the earth and then are used eventually by mother nature to raise up new living beings. So it’s wrong to look at the universe and say, well, the universe had a creation, so it had a creator and oh my gosh, that’s supernatural, or the universe has an end in space, and if we could just fly out far enough, we can meet the supernatural because that’s where the supernatural must be. And epicure said, that’s the wrong perspective. The universe is everything that exists. Everything that exists is composed of the atoms, which as you were mentioning last week, Joshua, it’s these atoms in the way they combine and so forth that takes the place in epicurean understanding of the universe, the place that the supernaturalist assigned to the supernatural. They think that the supernatural is required in order to force the atoms to do and produce the things that we see around us. When Epicurus is saying, no, there is no need for this outside force. There is no reason to shackle yourself with the idea of a supernatural force above you when the atoms of the universe have the capacity on their own to produce all of the things that we see around us and to produce we ourselves, and that that’s the natural scheme of things. This is a constantly renewing, constantly circular process of things coming into being, having lifespans going out of being back into their constituent atoms and over and over again eternally that that makes much more sense than any supernatural explanation because that’s what we see going on around us all the time, this cycle of life and change back and forth from the constituent parts to its bodies forever. That is what we see. This gets back to the logical part of what we’re talking about a minute ago. That’s the process that we see. We have never seen any other process other than this circular motion and change of the atoms. Why would you ever want to suggest the possibility that something that you’ve never seen, that you have no reason to bring into the picture all of a sudden could just take the place of everything else that you have seen? Why would you suggest that the nature that you’re familiar with from the moment you are born to the moment you die, what you see in front of you, how can you just abandon what you see, abandon the senses and think, well, maybe there’s something else beyond this. Maybe there’s something that overrules everything the senses have told you your entire life and brings into the picture a supernatural God of the machine as they talk about in the theater that would overturn everything that you’ve experienced. That’s nonsensical, fantastical, if not insane to suggest something like that, but people do suggest it. The majority of the world thinks that something like that is going on, and so when epicure says if that kind of thing doesn’t bother you, then you don’t need natural science, but everybody in the world seems to be bothered by that and seems to bother everyone else with it. So you must understand this foundational natural science or you will constantly be thrown off of your smooth motion by these people who are trying to upset you as Lucretius says, they’re inventing these schemes and inventing these myths to upset your ability to plan and live your own life. That’s why all this is so important. That’s what Lucretia says when he launches into all of this at the very beginning of his poem. The priests are even now spinning new tales to upset you and to make you doubt that the natural universe around you is reliable and that your senses are capable of understanding it. And we’re not just talking about the priests of the conventional religions. We’re also talking about other philosophers who have come to some kind of a skeptical position that knowledge is impossible. The authority I like to cite on this point is fragment five from Di of Lander where he says others do not explicitly stigmatize natural science as unnecessary being ashamed to acknowledge this but use other means of discarding it for when they assert that things are incomprehensible. What else are they saying then? That there is no need for us to pursue natural science after all, who will choose to seek what he can never find? Now, Aristotle and those who hold the same peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable because things are continually in flux and on account of the rapidity of the flux evade our apprehension. We on the other hand, we epicurean acknowledge their flux, but not it’s being so rapid that the nature of each thing is at no time apprehensible by sense perception. So Dogen ovo Ander is explaining that these attacks at your ability to live happily are going to come from many different sides, many different types of people who are intent on upsetting your confidence in your ability to live your own life. They’re spinning these tales, they’re constantly throwing them at you, and you have to be prepared to understand why they are wrong, how they are manipulating you, and to reject that for the nonsense which it really is.

Joshua: I think it’s important to consider how radical in a sense these ideas were for the ancient Greeks. And even though Epicurus never came under threat in Athens of being indicted or charged or imprisoned or exiled, this was the fate of other philosophers who were trying to understand the universe in natural terms. And Exus had proposed that the sun was not a God. It was a mass of blazing hot metal larger than the Peese. And for this, he was threatened by the Athenian government and went into exile and SCUs. There was another thinker named Aris stares, and we don’t know much about Aris stares, but Archimedes in his book The Sand Racker mentions Aris and his view on the cosmos, and this is what he has to say because this makes a point that for many Greeks at the time, including many Greek philosophers at the time, particularly of the platonic or peripatetic school, these weren’t just physical ideas. These ideas had theological implications that were considered to be dangerous if they were allowed to spread. And so Archimedes, in his book, the Sand Ner has this to say, and I’m reading this from the Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reed. Archimedes says this, but Arista has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses wherein it appears as a consequence of the assumptions made that the universe is many times greater than the air quote universe just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of fixed stars situated about the same center as the sun is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the sphere bears to its surface. That’s a bit convoluted, but it contains a dangerous idea. And the idea is that the earth itself as a physical body is capable of motion through space. In the letter to Epi, Epicurus talks about eclipses and how the interposition of the earth between the sun and the moon is one possible way to explain a lunar eclipse and the interposition of the moon between the earth and the sun is one possible way to explain a solar eclipse. So we do know that Epicurus thought some of these bodies are in motion or can be in motion, but flu tar records the response to Arista’s idea of the cosmos, and he puts the comment in the mouth, ofthe says this blue tark would later comment that cl thought it was the duty of the Greeks to indict Arista of samos on charges of impiety for putting in motion the hearth of the universe, IE, the earth. This being the effect of his attempt to save the phenomena by supposing heaven to remain at rest and the earth to revolve in an oblique circle while it rotates at the same time about its own axis. There’s a story I think about Galileo where he was forced to recant and the myth or legend is that even while he was recanting under his breath, he was muttering. It moves, it moves, the earth moves, but this proposal that these bodies are merely natural and that they are put into motion is actually a threat to Greek religious sensibilities. And we have encountered clean an in other readings, haven’t we? He was the one when we were going through Cicero who proposed, if you can imagine a painting of pleasure sitting on her throne and the virtue circled around her as her attendance putting virtue in service of pleasure and how horrifying we’re supposed to think that is. I think that was cle, wasn’t it? Cassius?

Cassius: Yes, it was.

Joshua: And so we see this isn’t a town and gown dispute as we would describe with later Oxford Cambridge disputes with their municipalities. This is another philosopher saying to Arista that his views about the cosmos were irreligious and were dangerous and should be suppressed. And Epicurus view I think was even worse because Arista says that the universe is many times larger than anyone had previously thought. But what Epicurus is saying is the universe is infinite. Not only does the world that we live in, not only is it capable of motion because it’s made of atoms and atoms are capable of motion, but it came out of the atoms and it will one day return into atoms. And so I think this gives a glimpse into the world of Epicurus and the world of his co thinkers in which you have people who are pushing the boundaries of what is known in the universe, and you have other people, even other philosophers pushing back against it as saying, this is a violation of religion, this is a violation of Greek theology and this needs to be suppressed. We cannot allow this stuff to get out.

Cassius: Yeah. Joshua, the point you’re making now is the ultimate point of this episode of this principle of physics, and it’s where we’re going to eventually close the episode today on that point. But before we do this, one more thing specifically I’ve wanted to include to address a concern that some people have one more time, that this is an issue of physics that has no relationship to me because modern scientists tell us that the universe is a certain size, a certain shape, a certain number of years old, and that’s all I need to know. Regardless of what your viewpoint is about, which of the latest theories is likely to prove to be the most accurate in modern science? A benefit I think that everyone can get from Epicurus analysis of this question is to look back at the way Epicurus reasoned it through. It’s in the literature ticus section 41, but I’m going to read it from the way Lucious expressed it in book one, starting around line 9 51. But since I have taught that the most solid bodies of matter fly about forever vanquished through the ages, come now let us unfold whether there be a certain limit to their full sum or not. And likewise, the void that we’ve discovered or room or space in which all things are carried on, let us see clearly whether it is altogether bounded or spreads out, limitless and immeasurably deep. And here’s the part where he gives his reasoning at 9 58. The whole universe then is bounded in no direction of its ways for then it would be bound to have an extreme point. Now it is seen that nothing can have an extreme point unless there be something beyond to bound it so that there seen to be a spot further than that, which the nature of our sense can follow it as it is. Since we must admit that there is nothing outside the whole sum, it has not an extreme point. It lacks therefore bound and limit, nor does it matter in what quarter of it you take your stand. So true is it that whatever place every man takes up, he leaves the whole boundless just as much on every side. And the reason I wanted to point that out is that epicure is not attempting to put his telescope up against somebody else’s telescope. He’s making a logical deduction that if something exists, then it’s part of the universe. Because to be limited means just that it has a limit, it has an extreme point, but logically speaking, you can always go further out and there’s no logical reason to expect that you will ever come to an end. The creature just gives the example later on of shooting the arrow. Either the arrow is going to hit something, in which case something is there or the arrow is going to keep flying through space, in which case the space is there. This is a logical argument. This is akin, I would say to the whole issue of atoms in the first place saying that there must be atoms. Even though we cannot sense them, there must be no end to the universe, even though we can’t through our senses, confirm that it just makes sense that has to be that way. And whether you talk about atoms on the smallest extreme or the universe as boundless on the largest extreme, our logic tells us that this must be the case and our logic is confirmed by the things that we can sense that we can touch and that we can see we’re not taking a logical position that has no basis in evidence. We have plenty of evidence about the way that nature operates. And while we are not able to explain every aspect of an atom and we’re not able to explain every aspect of the universe, we can be confident that given our experience, there is no reason to think anything other than that there is an atom at the smallest end and that the highest end the universe itself is boundless. Again, this is not a telescope or radio telescopic type of position. It’s not a position that’s going to tell you necessarily whether the big bang is a better theory than steady state or some other variation. What it is going to though do is provide your mind some framework within which you can grasp that there’s no reason to go looking for supernatural explanations for things when you’ve got a logical and reasonable deduction available to you based on the evidence that you do have at hand. We’re not going to go into it today, but if you go into Lucious and you go into tus, you’ll see that epicurus held. If the size of the universe were infinite, but there was only a finite supply of matter, then the universe would never have come together in bodies the way it does. On the other hand, if the universe had an infinite supply of matter, but space was limited, then everything would be close, packed, and again, the universe would not be as we see it is. That is an example of how evidence that is available to us is used in the process of deductive reasoning to come up with a reasonable explanation for what we do, in fact see. And so that type of reasoning, which is very similar to what we discussed last week in terms of how we deduce, nothing comes from nothing by thinking about, well, maybe things can come from nothing. Do we see X, Y, and Z happening if things can come from nothing? Well, no, we don’t see that happening. And so therefore we conclude that everything comes from something and that something cannot come from nothing. We validate our conclusions by testing them against the evidence that is available to us. The same type of analysis is being applied here to the question of whether the universe as a whole had a beginning that could have been caused by God, or whether the universe as a whole has a limit in space outside of which a supernatural God could live. Neither of them have any reason for us to take those suggestions seriously. And so we should not take them seriously and not let them cause us concerns. We should go about our lives ordering our day-to-day decisions, our choices and avoidances according to the things that our senses do make available to us to test and not worrying about things that have never come to the attention of our senses in the past. That’s why the principle that the universe is infinite and eternal is significant because that gives you the framework to understand why and to be confident of the conclusion that the universe has no supernatural forces over it. So there’s so much that we could be discussing about the details of these issues, but only so much that we can include within the confines of one episode of the Lares Today podcast. Before we end though Joshua closing thoughts for today,

Joshua: It occurs to me caius, we open today with the discussion of the meaning of the word universe and what should we take that to mean? And the takeaway is it’s everything that exists, everything that has existence, everything that is reducible to the atoms. And I find that in one of Robert Frost’s poems, he has a very interesting way of explaining this. He takes a line from an earlier poet, Walter Savage Andor, and that line is nature I loved and next to nature art, and in his poem, Lucious versus the Lake Poets, he extends the theme of that one line from Landor’s Quadrant and he says, this, Dean, adult education may seem silly. What of it though? I got some willy-nilly the other evening at your college deanery and grateful for it. Let’s not be facetious for I thought Epicurus and lucious by nature meant the whole goddamn machinery. But you say that in college nomenclature, the only meaning possible for nature in landor’s quaran would be pretty scenery, which makes opposing it to art absurd. I grant you, if you’re sure about the word God, bless the dean and make his deanship plenary. So the point that he’s making here is that we have this understanding of nature in its many different senses, the sense of the trees, and when you go outside and you take a walk through the woods, that you’re going out into nature. What we don’t often think is that even sitting in the chair in your living room, sitting at your coffee table, drinking your morning cup of coffee as I am now, you’re also you are in nature. I think it’s a matter of perspective in some senses. We have to continually remind ourselves of our position in the world and in the cosmos, in the universe, and Epicurus is able, I think, to do that. And he says in several places that this is actually not just a habit of his. This is one of the most important aspects of a life cultivated toward happiness, toward pleasure. As he says in letter to Tus in section 37, since the method I have described is valuable to all those who are accustomed to the investigation of nature, I who urge upon others the constant occupation in the investigation of nature and find my own peace chiefly and a life so occupied, have composed for you. Another epitome on these lines, summing up the first principles of the whole doctrine for Epicurus, this is not something to do from time to time. He says that his own peace, he finds chiefly in a life occupied in the investigation of nature. We should spend more of our time doing this. And I think that’s a goading that we could all use from time to time. I think, and it helps as we’re doing now in this series of episodes, to go through these, even though we’ve done it a hundred times before, we’ll do it a hundred times. Again, it’s helpful to focus your attention on this stuff.

Cassius: That’s a great way to close Joshua. And a good reminder of something that we’re constantly dealing with in studying epicurean philosophy. Does the word nature mean pretty scenery or does it mean the whole goddamn machinery? Does the word pleasure mean sex, drugs, and rock and roll, or does it mean every feeling, which is not pain? Does the word virtue mean a tool for achieving pleasure or does it mean some kind of an absolute goal that is an end in itself and is its own reward? Epicurus is a philosopher. He’s not a magician. Neither he nor any other philosopher can change the facts of your existence. But what they can do is give you an understanding so that you can work with the facts of your existence and change them for the better to live a happier life. If you look to Epicurus as if he’s some kind of a magician, then you’re doing what the Religionists do and you’re looking for the supernatural. And that just does not exist from the point of view of Epicurus, figuratively bringing down from the heavens and approach to life that allows you to live successfully and happily, that is an achievement and something to be very, very grateful that he did and makes it extremely worth exploring as we do at the Epicurean Friends Forum and in this series of podcasts now, in the list of subjects that we cover on the front page of the Epicurean Friends Forum, our next topic would be The Nature of the Gods as containing nothing that’s inconsistent with incorruption or blessedness, but we’ve just spent a long series of episodes on that topic going through Ciceros on the nature of the Gods, and especially a single episode we did with our friend Don, talking about our conclusions after going through all of that. So we’re going to come back next week and start with the topic. Death is Nothing to us, and that’s certainly a deep subject that we’ll have plenty to say about. In the meantime, before next week, drop by the Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our other discussions of Epicurus. Thank you for your time today. We’ll see you again soon. Bye.