Episode 327 - Intelligent Design vs Emergence
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Welcome to Episode 327 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, 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 at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we start are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective. We are focusing first on what is referred to as Book One, which provides an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and gives us an overview of the philosophical issues being dealt with at the time of Epicurus. This week will focus on the ending of Section 7.
Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackam translation here:
Transcript (Unedited)
Section titled “Transcript (Unedited)”Cassius (00:10):
Welcome to episode 327 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius 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 text 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 epicure@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this in all of our podcast episodes. This week we are finishing up in section seven from Cicero’s Academic Questions book one of course from an Epicurean point of view. Last week we devoted the episode to the earlier parts of section seven, which talked about the division of nature from the point of view of basically everybody but epicurus into active and passive aspects. And as one of the aspects of that division, we talked about the importance that the platonic related schools placed on the question of infinite divisibility.
(01:19):
That took us into a discussion of geometry as something based on that kind of analysis, which posits things that Epicurus would say do not really exist in the universe from an atoms perspective. And we’re going to discuss today the application of the property quality discussion we mentioned last week, and we’re going to focus our attention on the things that were said at the very end of section seven, which really bring to the front the differences between Epicurus point of view and these other schools because this final section presents very clearly where you end up when you start out dividing the world between active and passive and suggesting that there are powers that could enable infinite divisibility to take place. So Joshua, if you have any thoughts on last week, please let us know. If not when you’re ready, lead us into section seven.
Joshua (02:17):
Yes, Cassius, we are in section seven in book one, and we are still in this long section in which Vero is laying out for us the three divisions of philosophy. In a kind of general summary, we’ve started with ethics and we’ve gone through that. We’re currently discussing nature and then in section eight we will move on to logic, which is the division of philosophy that they thought included both dialectic and rhetoric. So similar to the epicurean approach of ethics, physics and canons, but today we’re still on nature and they say Vero, that the parts of the world are all the things which exist in it and which are maintained by sentient nature in which perfect reason is placed, which is also everlasting for there is nothing more powerful, which can be the cause of its dissolution and this power they call the soul of the world and also its intellect and perfect wisdom and they call it God a providence, watching over everything subject to its dominion and above all over the heavenly bodies and next to them over those things on earth which concern men, which also they sometimes call necessity because nothing can be done in a manner different from that in which it has been arranged by it in a destined and inevitable continuation of eternal order.
(03:48):
Sometimes too, they call it fortune because it brings about many unforeseen things which have never been expected by us on account of the obscurity of their causes and our ignorance of them.
Cassius (04:01):
Joshua, thanks for reading that for us. These several sentences here are not particularly long, but they are tremendously important for our understanding what Epicurus was reacting to and when he developed this philosophy, what he considered to be the most important things to do, to deal with problems that what we’ve just read present. This is not merely historical or academic interest, but as we go through these, I think it will be clear that the fundamental positions taken by these philosophers are exactly the same or with only minor changes very similar to the positions that are taken by most people in the world today. We’ve come very far over the last 2000 years in technology in science of understanding certain aspects of the way things work, but in the end, the ultimate conclusions that many people reach today continue to be the same as were reached 2000 years ago.
(05:04):
And in order for us to be clear about the implications of following an epicurean philosophy view of life versus following the standard view of life, it’s really important to always keep in mind where these areas of divergence start. And I think it applies whether you consider yourself a stoic or a platonist or an Aristotelian or you just got some eclectic blend of philosophy. Non epicurean philosophers concluded that nature is sentient, that it embodies perfect reason and that it has a power which these people will call the soul of the world and that it has intellect and perfect wisdom and they call it God a providence watching over everything subject to its dominion. And when you start talking about what is subject to its dominion, you go from the heavenly bodies all the way down to the affairs of men and of those things, nothing can be done other than the way in which it is done.
(06:09):
They call this necessity. Everything has been destined and is an inevitable continuation of eternal order. Now, sometimes as Varo says here, people will call this force fortune because they don’t have the ability to understand and predict and therefore expect the things that happen. So they’ll embellish it with a capital F and call it fortune or luck throughout history, people calling upon fortune as if it were a force, as if it were itself a goddess because they don’t understand the causes and they are ignorant of how things can occur without the presence of such a force. So we probably will spend much of the rest of the day talking about this issue and how Epicurus responds to it. But what Epicurus saw when he was growing up and was confronted with a theory of chaos that somehow there’s this organizing force outside of chaos which organized chaos into the things that we see today.
(07:14):
That is the central question that epicure has confronted and knew that he had to answer. If there is a supernatural divine intelligent force behind everything, then it is perfectly reasonable to think that there is a providence watching over everything and everything will happen by necessity. In fact, it’s unreasonable to think anything else from the point of view of these people who think that everything comes from this divine force and that nature itself is intelligent and has a goal. That’s the fundamental question that has to be confronted that epicurus at a very early age understood, has to be confronted and that’s where in exposure to democracy and aism, he developed his theory that all things can happen without the influence of a supernatural force, but democracy and aism, as we’ve discussed before, and we’ll discuss more as we go along, is not in itself a satisfactory answer to the questions that are raised here because democracy and atom is based significantly on reducing everything to discussing some kind of fundamental atoms and believing that that level of atoms moving through the void is the only reality there is.
(08:32):
And in fact, overlaying that is the problem that Democrats confronted in Epicurus opinion failed to solve about how you can know anything to be true if you think that the truth is hidden at the bottom of a deep dark well and that the level on which we live is not even a real level. There’s nothing except Adams and void out there. That’s the mix of ideas that were prominent at the time that Epicurus grew up and started to form his philosophy, a mixture of what he would call and what those people who follow epicure philosophy would call false ideas about the universe, ideas that are very attractive in certain ways. If you want to think that you’re going to have life after death, if you want to think that there’s some supernatural force looking after you, these ideas are very attractive. They can seem compelling, but from Epicurus point of view, they are wrong. So at this point in the conversation, I want to also generically refer to what Epic’s response to all this was and how he answered these concerns that are listed in this paragraph. But let me get back to Joshua for a second and see if he has anything to say before we turn to that.
Joshua (09:45):
Yeah, so in this final paragraph of section seven of book one, we have this reference to sentient nature and we have this reference to a power and this power. He says they call it God or providence or necessity or fortune. And just as a few weeks ago we were talking about the theory of the four classical elements and that led us back into Plato’s TEUs. This also leads back into Plato’s tomatoes because this gets us very close to the central philosophical and theological claim made in the works of Plato, and that is specifically that there is an artisan that stands outside nature and has fashioned chaos into cosmos that has turned the raw material into the finished work. And the name that they give him is demi urge or in Greek demi orgo. It was originally according to Wikipedia, a common noun meaning a craftsman or artisan, but it gradually came to mean producer and eventually creator, the philosophical usage and the proper noun derived from Plato’s to MEUs where the demi urge is presented as the creator of the universe.
(11:02):
So I’m going to dive right into that and there’s a lot of ground to cover, so I hope it all becomes clear as we go through it. But the general structure here of the universe that he’s describing, and you get the sense of this from Vero here in academic questions, is you’ve got the universe itself, which is as it said there, sentient nature in which perfect reason is placed, which is also everlasting. So that is the idea that the universe itself, the world that we live in, the world of the earth and the sun and the stars and the moon and the planets, that that is itself a God and it is suffused with soul and reason, perfect reason was placed into that God, but who placed it there and it was the demi that existed outside of nature that did the placing. You’ve got a hierarchy of gods according to this structure.
(11:58):
You’ve got the demi urge, the artisan, the craftsman that is outside of nature. Then you’ve got the universe itself as a God as quote, sentient nature in which perfect reason is placed, which is also everlasting. And then you’ve got the lower level of gods which are sort of personified by the planets and the sun and that world. The world that Vero is describing for us is the world of Plato’s Timaeus. I quoted Timaeus in a previous episode saying this, all men who have any right feeling at the beginning of any enterprise call upon the gods and he who is about to speak of the origin of the universe as a special need of their aid, may my words be acceptable to them and may I speak in the manner which will be most intelligible to you, Socrates and will best express my own meaning. He then goes on to say this first I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes, and which is apprehended by reason and reflection and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense.
(13:02):
I’ve quoted all this before, this should be familiar to some of you, but the next sentence it gets into where we’re going today, all that becomes and is created is the work of a cause and that is fair, which the artificer makes after an eternal pattern, but whatever is fashioned after a created pattern is not fair. And this brings up the question, is the world itself created or uncreated? He says, that’s the first question and he says, the answer is the world is created being visible and tangible and having a body and therefore sensible and if sensible, then created and if created made by a cause. And the cause is the ineffable father of all things. The cause is the demi. The cause is the artisan father that stands outside of nature. He’s in his workshop outside of nature, bringing the universe, the cosmos into being and to me says if created made by a cause, the cause is the ineffable father of things who had before him an eternal archetype.
(14:12):
This is that old argument from Cicero’s de natural de orum between Valle and the others in that in which he’s talking about where is the workshop of the God who made the universe? That’s one of Val’s objections. So the demi is using a pattern, he’s using a form as his pattern, his architectural drawings if you will, for how to design the world. The archetype itself is uncreated. He says, for to imagine that the archetype was created would be blasphemy, seeing that the world is the noblest of creations and God is the best of causes and the world being thus created according to the eternal pattern is the copy of something. And we may assume that words are akin to the matter of which they speak. What is spoken of the unchanging or intelligible must be certain or true, but what is spoken of the created image can only be probable.
(15:11):
Let me reread that sentence. What is spoken of the unchanging or intelligible must be certain and true, but what is spoken of the created image can only be probable. In other words, we can speak with certainty about the uncreated archetype by which the demi urge created nature, but nature itself as a created image fashioned after the archetype, we can only speak with probability. Being he says is to becoming what truth is to believe. And amid the variety of opinions which have arisen about God and the nature of the world, we must be content to take probability for our rule considering that I who am the speaker and you who are the judges are only men to probability we may attain but no further. And he makes the further point. Socrates says, excellent, TEUs, I like your manner of approaching the subject, proceed. TEUs says, why did the creator make the world?
(16:16):
And the answer he gives is He was good and not jealous. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be like himself. Wherefore he said, in order the visible world which he found in disorder, now he who is the best could only create the fairest and reflecting that of visible things, the intelligent is superior to the unintelligent. He put intelligence in soul and soul in body and framed the universe to be the best and fairest work in the order of nature and the world became a living soul through the providence of God. And we’ll have much more here to go through if you want to do that, Cassius, but first let me stop and get your response reply. What are your thoughts on this view of cosmology presented in Platos? Dima?
Cassius (17:09):
You’re right, Joshua. There’s a thousand different ways we can take this. I think what I would like to hammer home at this point is to repeat that rather than chase rabbits down holes to the point where you get tired, you get disgusted, you get frustrated and you think, well, there’s no answer to any of this, so I’m just going to put it aside and forget about it. The important thing I think to point out about that possibility is I think that’s exactly what the people who promote this stuff want you to do, and that’s why you can’t do it. That’s why you can’t let it go. You can’t let them convince you that confidence on the most important issues in life is impossible because they are making decisions in their lives essentially attempting to tell you what to do. You have the same problem. You have to decide how to respond to that, whether you are just going to default and let them postulate that there’s some universe outside of this one that they have a connection to, but you really don’t and you’ve just better listen to them.
(18:14):
All of this has that very practical implication that if nothing is anything ever more than probable, if there is a true world beyond this one that they persuade you they have a better knowledge of than you do, then you essentially become slaves to their desires and their viewpoints. So don’t let yourself get frustrated by thinking that this is also difficult. This is also intellectual. There’s no way that I simple person that I am can ever understand these things. I just better go to church on Sunday, read the intellectuals and do exactly what the experts tell me to do. That’s not only a result that epicurus tells you is wrong, but it’s just the worst possible answer to an assertion of claims that have no natural basis and sensation. Nothing that you can prove given what nature has given to you. Again, point back to the universal appreciation.
(19:17):
I think that lucious and to some extent dogen needs of olander, the people we have the most information about who were spreading epicure in philosophy hundreds of years after Epicurus, the intensity and drive that they had is because I think they understood what’s at stake here. The things that we’re talking about now, these are not just dry technical, take it or leave it discussions. If the universe is intelligent, if intelligent design is the way everything is organized, then anybody who accepts that premise is going to live their lives much differently than someone who believes that they are essentially are in charge of their own lives. They have to take responsibility for living happily, and they have to go out and understand for themselves what is the best way to live. So again, I think it’s an error to just continually kick down the road coming to terms in your own mind with arguments like this, putting the book back on the bookshelf so to speak, does nothing to ultimately help you decide how to make the best decisions in life.
(20:24):
Every time we go very deep into one of these ancient texts, I want to be sure to come up for air and make sure that we understand the practical ramifications of where these people are going. It’s constantly, as epicure said in the letter to ISTs, it’s constantly a matter of keeping the big picture in mind and going back and forth between the big picture and the details. If you let the details get you so wrapped up in them that you lose sight of the big picture, then you’re basically lost. If you stick only at the big picture and never talk about any details, you’re not going to have the confidence that you need to confront challenges to your points of view. You’ve got to have both. And I think that’s what Epicurus essentially is a trying to provide.
Joshua (21:04):
Yeah, the practical ramifications are very important. Cicero himself translated to MEUs into Latin around 45 bc and it was this Latin translation that was taken up by St. Augustine and others like him, and it came to be one of the more important dialogues of Plato in the Middle Ages. In fact, Wikipedia says during much of the middle ages in the Latin speaking west, the EU was the sole work of Plato, which was typically available in monastic libraries. And I’ve already quoted previously from the translator Benjamin JT who says, of all the writings of Plato, the EU is the most obscure and repulsive to the modern reader. There is a little bit more though that I wanted to cover in here. So we started with the first question was the world created the uncreated, he says, created. We come to the second question, why did the creator make the world?
(21:59):
TEUs says he was good and therefore not jealous. I already read all that. And then he brings up the next question in the likeness of what being was the world made? That is the third question. He says, the form of the perfect being was a whole and contained all intelligible beings made after the pattern of this included in it all visible creatures. The fourth question, are there many worlds or only one? He says only one for if in the original there had been more than one, they would’ve been the parts of a third, which would’ve been the true pattern of the world, and therefore there is and will ever be. But one created world now that which is created is of necessity, corporeal and visible and tangible, visible and therefore made of fire. He says, tangible and therefore solid and made of earth. And he summarizes his view so far, he says, and so the thought of God, the thought of the demi urge, the artisan, the craftsman made a God, the universe in the image of a perfect body having intercourse with himself and needing no other, but in every part harmonious and self-contained and truly blessed.
(23:13):
The soul was first made by him, the elder to rule the younger. And when the creator had made the soul, he made the body within her and the soul interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven herself turning in herself began a divine life of rational and everlasting motion. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible and partakes of reason and harmony and is the best of creations being the work of the best, the work of the demi urge. So I will stop there in the reading of the timus, but he does go on and on talking about the origin of the gods of Greek mythology and the origin of other animals and other beings that live in this world that he’s describing, but this view of an artisan standing outside of nature with an archetype that is itself eternal and building the universe that we live in, which is itself a God and creating that universe after the fashion of the archetype, that view has survived into academic questions.
Cassius (24:25):
Yes, Joshua, that has survived into this book of academic questions. And that’s where we are at the moment at this general summary level of first having looked at the ethics, discussing the nature of good now in nature, discussing the nature of the universe and whether it is in fact intelligently designed, whether it is in fact itself alive and intelligent or not. And again, we’re at a very high level of analysis at this moment. And so for the rest of the time today, probably what we should just do is quickly touch back on Epicurus as a response at this higher level of analysis in response to the idea that nature is intelligent, that the world is God, that everything essentially is working through providence and necessity towards some intelligent goal or end. As most everyone knows, Epicurus rejected that. And again, at this very high level, it’s appropriate to remember that what Epicurus held is that nature does all of the things that we see going on creates us, provides the changes of the seasons and everything else we see here on our world entirely without intelligent supervision, entirely without intelligent design.
(25:42):
This continues to be probably the most basic question that people continue to have today. How can all of what we see happen without an intelligent designer, without a motivation behind it, without a goal set for it by a supernatural power that is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all the things that we invest the idea of a God with today, and again at this general level, Epicurus is response is that the things that we see around us do come into being and are governed not by supernatural God, nor are they totally chaotic, nor are they random so to speak, but they arise from the motion of the atoms through the void. And we’re not going to go very far down this trail today, but when we read what Epicurus and lucretius have to say about this, we generally talk in terms that what we see around us emerges from the atoms.
(26:44):
That in contrast to Democrat’s view that nothing is real except the atoms moving through the void. The things that we see around us, we ourselves are also real and that there need be no supernatural basis for that. And of course people will stumble here at this point and wonder perhaps in the words of the Kansas song, are we just dust in the wind? Are we nothing but pieces of material? How can the things that we do and say and feel possibly be nothing more than dust? How can they arise from the dust without there being some force that brings them into existence? The word used in this context is cause. What is the cause of the things that we see? How can a brain, how can an eye, can a tree be caused by atoms moving through the void without guidance are not things so complicated and complex that there’s no possibility that they could exist, but for a designer behind them and describing how that occurs in general terms is not the same as being able to say that you so completely understand the mechanism that you yourself as a human being could go out and create your own world because you know exactly how it operates.
(28:05):
Nevertheless, even though you don’t have the power to create your own world, humans do have the power of understanding models that provide them the ability to analyze and understand and be comfortable with the things that are happening in a way similar to as Dogen Avoider talks about the flux not being so fast that we cannot apprehend it. Intelligent beings have the brain power, whether you want to call it anticipations of paralysis or something else, to take the input from the census and organize it into understandable patterns. The word we often use to describe how that ability has arisen is that it has emerged from the atoms and the void. It is not the same as the atoms of the void. It is a quality, it is a property. It is a phenomena that does have its own existence and reality, but it is not something that is reducible only to atoms in void.
(29:10):
Someone who’s really interested in this should take a look at an article by Dr. David Sly called Epicurean anti Reductionism. And although that has an imposing title to it, it’s discussing the question that we’re discussing now. How can we get comfortable with ourselves? Everything we see in the world emerging from atoms moving through the void, we all have this tendency to think of atoms as just, again, being small pieces of dust. You’ve got a pile of dust, you’ve got space for the dust to move around in. Are you saying that you can just jumble those together and produce a human being? Of course, you can’t just jumble them together in a test tube and produce a human being. As Epicurus explains. The atoms have to be arranged in particular ways in order to produce the phenomena that we see. But there are examples that will make it easier for us to understand what we’re talking about when we refer to emergence.
(30:13):
I think Joshua’s got a couple of examples that he can cite, but one that I would cite myself would be, suppose you have a fire burning in front of you, and suppose you choose to open on top of that fire, a canister of hydrogen and a canister of oxygen. If you choose to do so and release those atoms onto the fire, you’re going to have a bigger fire if not an explosion. But if you take those same atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and have them combined into H2O, you have water which will put out the fire. The water has properties that the atoms alone of hydrogen and oxygen do not have, in fact are very different than the properties of hydrogen and oxygen acting alone. That is no doubt, a very simplistic example, but I do think it’s important to get comfortable and find ways like that of understanding that everything in life is not reducible to the atoms from which they are composed.
(31:17):
This issue of emergence is why Lucious and Epicurus are talking about atoms moving through the void. It’s why Democrats was talking about atoms moving through the void. But when Epicurus reviewed what Democrats had to say and found that Democrats was essentially saying that there is no truth other than the atoms in the void, Epicurus said, you’re wrong, Democrat. The things we as human beings, the things around us are every bit as real as the atoms from which our bodies are composed. You’re making a major mistake to think that you don’t exist, that you’re an illusion, and that you are of a lesser status than the atoms which compose your body. And so over time, as we go through the podcast and as we talk about things on acuring friends.com, we’ll pull out articles like Dr. S’s Epicurean anti reductionism and talk about the implications of that. But for today, Joshua, is there another perspective you could bring to this that helps us deepen our understanding of this issue of emergence on the level of a person of average, normal experience and intelligence? How do we get comfortable with the idea that the complicated and amazing things we see around us can somehow emerge from Adam’s moving through void?
Joshua (32:40):
I think when it comes to claims of special creation, what you need first is a language, a rhetoric or a jargon. The ability to talk about this stuff in a very precise way and to Aristotle in his discussion of causes is the most helpful for me. Aristotle talked about four proximate causes for everything that begins to exist. You’ve got the efficient cause, the formal cause, the material cause, and the final cause. The formal cause is the answer to the question, what shape does it take? What form was it modeled after the material cause answers the question, what is it made of? The efficient cause answers the question, how was it made? And the final cause answers the question, why was this thing brought into existence? What function, what purpose was it created to serve? And for things that are made artificially by humans, it makes sense to talk about final causes.
(33:43):
A cup or bowl was made with the final cause in view of holding liquids or solids contained within it so they don’t spill all over the table so that you have something that you can drink out of. You can look at all the things that surround you that are manmade and look for the cause, look for the why they exist. And very often you can find it, but there’s a kind of seism that we as humans suffer from, and that is the idea that we can create a table. So we look out into nature and we see a tree and we think that, well, the table was created by us. The tree must have been created by someone else. The mountain that the tree is growing on must have been created. The sun in the sky must have been created just as the table was created.
(34:31):
And it’s that view that we are encouraged by the ancient epicureans to oppose, and it’s the desire to find final causes in nature that lucious and epicurus especially resist lucious. For example, in book four, around line 8 23 in the Cy Bailey translation says this, he says, herein, you must eagerly desire to shun this fault. And with foresighted fear to avoid this error, do not think that the bright light of the eyes was created in order that we may be able to see. And the 1743 Pros translation says, but in subjects of this nature, guard yourself to the utmost of your power against that error, that gross mistake, and never believe that those bright orbs, the eyes were made that we might see, or that our legs were made upright and things fixed upon them and were supported by feet that we might walk and take large strides, that our arms were braced with strong sins and that our hands hung on both sides to assist us in those offices that are necessary to the support of life.
(35:47):
When you look at nature, you look at the how did it come together? But for most things it doesn’t make sense to ask the question why, but that’s what Tema does. He asked the question very explicitly. He says, why did the creator make the world? And the answer is, he was good and therefore not jealous. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be like himself. Wherefore he said, in order the visible world which he found in disorder, in other words, he’s ordering chaos into cosmos. Teme goes on to say, now he who is the best could only create the fairest and reflecting that of visible things, the intelligence is superior to the unintelligent. He put intelligence in soul and soul in body and framed the universe to be the best and fairest work in the order of nature and the world became a living soul through the providence of God, through the providence of the demi urge.
(36:45):
When you look to nature and you’re specifically looking at nature for final causes, it’s very easy for your brain to generate them, right? You could very easily say, well, the trunk of the tree was created. We don’t know who by it was created to hold up the leaves to lift them into the upper air so that they can more easily compete for sunlight. But we’ve got to understand that this view of nature is holding us back from a more complete understanding of what’s really going on. And what’s really going on is processes that are unguided, processes that are uninitiated by any intelligent mind that are not set into motion by an artisan or a craftsman, God standing outside of nature. The eye does not develop in order to let you see the existence of the eye, rather furnishes the opportunity for sight. So I think it’s very helpful Cassius to return to Aristotle and is core causes because understanding where these other schools were going is very helpful for understanding why Epicurus was rejecting that approach.
Cassius (37:54):
Joshua, I think you’ve pointed out one of the best examples in the text when you talked about Lucretius, specifically telling us not to think that just because the eyes exist, they have been created for the purpose of seeing. Another example of someone who thought through similar issues we can cite would be Thomas Jefferson, who in a letter to John Adams dated August the 15th of 1820 said this. He was commenting on a previous letter from John Adams and said, your puzzling letter of May 12 on matter, spirit in motion kept me from sleep as a crowd of skepticisms. I read it and laid it down, read it, laid it down again and again, and to give rest of my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne. I feel therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself. There are other existences, then I call them matter.
(38:49):
I feel them changing place. This gives me motion where there is an absence of matter. I call it void or nothing or immaterial space on the basis of sensation of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we have or need. Now, that’s the part that we generally quote. But what follows I think is directly on point with what we’re discussing today because Jefferson continues and says, I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter formed for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction in an action of matter or magnetism of load stone. When he who denies to the creator the power of endowing matter with the motion of action called thinking shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reigns the planets and the tracks of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will and by that will put matter into motion.
(39:52):
Then the materialists may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. Of course, Thomas Jefferson, there is somewhat of a deist and he’s talking in terms of a creator. And that’s exactly what we’re not to be thinking about from Reiss, an Epicurus point of view. But what Jefferson is addressing is this difficulty of thinking that the process of thought can arise from matter, just as it’s difficult to understand how magnets can affect each other at a distance without contact. That’s just how it’s difficult to understand how the sun can attract the planets. We can say that it’s gravity, but that word doesn’t really explain anything for us other than allow us to have a name to discuss the process that we think must govern the motion of the planets. The difficulty here that has to be addressed is getting comfortable with the idea not only that there is no supernatural creator, but getting comfortable with the idea that matter can do all of the things that we know we as human beings can do.
(41:02):
If we can’t get comfortable with the idea that atoms can produce properties and qualities and effects that emerge from these atoms that give rise to us as human beings who can think, who can breathe, who can live, then we’re not going to get comfortable with a natural explanation of the universe. We’re always going to be looking for that supernatural creation. So it’s important to address just as you’ve done there, Joshua, the idea of ultimate and final causes and realize that you’re not answering anything by postulating a supernatural creator because you can always ask where’d the creator come from? You can always have that infinite regress of questions, and it would appear that so much attention is devoted in epicurean philosophy to discussing the atoms and their emotions through the void and these issues of emergence. Because if we’re going to live happily, we have to have a comfort level with the conclusion that Democrats could not get passed.
(42:12):
We can’t stay at the level of Democrats and say that there’s nothing real but Adams moving through the void. We have to move to the level of epicurus to understand that the Adams moving through the void give rise to emergent phenomena that is just as real as the atoms themselves. We may not and almost certainly will not understand exactly how they do, but we have to have a thought process, a philosophy of life that gives us a framework of understanding that these things do occur and that there is no need for us to be consumed by anxiety about supernatural forces. The example of hydrogen and oxygen separately, not having any of the qualities of water is one such example. Over time, we’ll develop other examples that follow through on the thought processes that Dr. Sedley in his article on Epicurean anti reductionism talk about Josh was previously brought to my attention, the contention of some people on the internet that we can talk in terms of a wheel rolling downhill possessing attributes that are not explainable simply by sighting that atoms composed the wheel. This whole issue of emergent qualities, sort of like infinity takes thought to get comfortable with what’s being said and why it makes sense, but it seems clear that this is the direction that Epicurus was going in. And when you think about it, it seems to me it does make sense. So we’re about to come to the end of today’s episode, Joshua, as we begin to wrap up a very deep episode, any thoughts that you’d like to add before we close?
Joshua (43:58):
Yes. I quoted from Lucretius on the question of the eye and whether it develops in order to let us see. In other words, you look at these incredibly complex structures in nature and you are invited and encouraged by many people, the platonists among them, to think of the existence of these complex structures in terms of the final causes, in terms of the purpose for which they were created. But there was no purpose. And in many ways I think that’s a lot scarier for humans. I had a professor at college who was sort of specialized in science fiction, and he always made the distinction between the religious views of the middle ages in which the earth was thought of as the source of terror, the center of the earth is hell, and any passage that winds its way down there just gets worse and worse as you descend.
(44:54):
And that the sky by contrast was thought of as something well ordered and harmonious and holy in the sense of that’s the abode of God. But that as views on cosmology started to change, and as people started to understand that the center of the earth is not the hell of Christianity, earth is a planet like an infinite number of other planets, that the sky is our lens through which we look out into this vast terminable cosmos and that there is so much out there that we don’t know, that we haven’t explored, that we haven’t experienced, that the trope gets inverted right where the earth is now seen not as some place of terror, but as our home, as our collective home, as a species, and that the terror comes from the heavens, comes from the Martian saucers and whatnot, descending on an unsuspecting world. That is an exaggeration perhaps of the differences presented by these two philosophies.
(45:52):
But with Platonism, you do have the view that everything is ordered and everything is laid out by the craftsmen, by the artisan, and in Epicureanism, there is no craftsmen. There is no artisan standing over nature. Nature spontaneously generates things of herself constantly throwing up new forms, new compound bodies of atoms churning together in the void, and it’s a less tidy version of Nate’s. It’s less clean, less neat version. Also, perhaps for some people, a less reassuring version because we’ve gone now from a world, from a universe, from a cosmos that is explicable to MEUs, even says that the fewer reason that gave rise to the cosmos is more explicable than the cosmos itself, which is subject to sensation and therefore colored with opinion. But it’s a world that we can understand and a world that is also explicable through a moral lens, which the world of Epicurus is not the world of Epicurus is an alien place where humans are not the pinnacle of creation. We are just another aberration, just another mutation, just another form thrown up out of the cosmic stardust, and we’ll continue to explore the Sharpp distinction between these two approaches to cosmology as we go forward in this text. I believe though, in section eight next week we’ll be moving on from nature and into logic, rhetoric and dialectic and epistemology in academic questions.
Cassius (47:25):
That’s right, Joshua. When we come back next week, we’ll be moving on into the issues of what to make of the census and epistemology and knowledge, and again, this will be an area in which Epicurus disagrees not only with Varo and the presentation being brought by Cicero here, but also with Democrats. We’ll come back and explore as much of that as we have time for next week. In the meantime, thanks for being with us today, drop by the Epicurean Friends forum. If you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus, we’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.