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January 18, 2006
Judge Jones -- In the 15th Century
In trying to understand the history of atheism, it is probably necessary to understand why, at times, failure to believe in the gods really did seem wacky: in Europe before Newton and Darwin, for example.
The problem: "world orderliness," Schopenhauer called it - as evidenced by the remarkable regularities of the heavenly bodies as well as the remarkable complexity and efficiency of living bodies. Explain that with your "materialism"! Tell us that is just the product of "blind chance"!
Fact is it was damn difficult -- before gravity, before evolution -- to explain the presence of order and complexity in the universe without recourse to a "divine creator."
Let's say some Judge Jones six centuries ago had been asked to rule on an effort by a school board to begin classes with a statement that there was another "theory" of creation: that all the marvels that make up the heavens and the earth just arrived by accident. Might he not have dismissed that notion as characterized by "breathtaking inanity"?
Posted by Mitchell Stephens at January 18, 2006 5:04 PM
Comments
Fact is it was damn difficult -- before gravity, before evolution -- to explain the presence of order and complexity in the universe without recourse to a "divine creator."
Yet the Buddha in India, a millenium and a half earlier, had no difficulty with that; the suttas in the Pali Canon are completely without reference to any sort of "divine creator". In fact, the Buddha was quite explicit in his repeated insistence that no event could be explained by an act of god.
Posted by: Richard Blumberg at January 20, 2006 7:44 AM
Yeah, difficult but not impossible. And that Buddha fella keeps finding his way in here.
A couple of the Greeks -- whose Gods weren't given responsibility for creating the cosmos anyway -- managed to imagine it all working with divine intervention. See, for example, Anaxagoras, who is said to have seen a meteorite and then concluded that the heavenly bodies were just rocks.
Posted by: mitch at January 20, 2006 8:26 AM
I meant to type "without divine intervention" above.
Posted by: mitch at January 20, 2006 8:27 AM
