Is Everything Just Atoms & Void?
A man does test everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the test (G.K. Chesterton, The Common Way).
A “worldview” according to Webster’s Dictionary is:
A comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint.
And three distinct standpoints, or worldviews, we have…based on three ancient teachers:
Democritus (370 B.C.)
Plato (348 B.C.)
Aristotle (322 B.C.)
These three teachers describe three conceptions of the world within which each of our own individual worldviews may well find its place.
Here are those three fundamental conceptions of the world:
Entirely Material (Democritus)
Partly Material, Partly Spiritual (Plato)
Spiritual-Material (Aristotle)
Let us take a deeper look into each one of these worldviews, as taught by their teachers, and as held by their contemporary disciples.
Entirely Material
…ἄτομος και κενόν (atoms & void)(Democritus, as recorded by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.135).
Along with Leucippus, the ancient Father of Atomic Theory, Democritus (of whom we know much more about), a native of Thrace, in Ancient Greece, proposed that the world was made up entirely of “ἄτομος και κενόν” (in English: atoms “uncuttables” and void).
For the ancient atomists, the diversity within nature was caused merely by the result of varying combinations of atoms (sound familiar?).
Beyond these atoms and their arrangements, was mere nothingness or void. As Democritus and Leucippus taught:
Of these, the one, “what-is,” is full and solid, the other, “what-is-not,” is empty and rare…the differences <among these> are the causes of the rest…the differences are three: shape, arrangement, and position…For A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in arrangement, and Z from N in position (recorded by Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.4 985b4–20, cited in A Presocratics Reader, Second Edition).
The theoretical problems with the atomist’s worldview were, ironically, plain even to the atomists themselves: the first of which being, that if atomism is true, then Truth is not.
For Truth being a “conformity between the intellect and the thing known” (to cite St. Thomas), without “intellect” (or an immaterial faculty, outside of the material system) neither Truth nor Falsity could exist.
Therefore, neither would there be a way, even in principle, to call the atomist theory true. In the words of Democritus himself:
In reality we know nothing about anything, but for each person opinion is a reshaping [of atoms] (Democritus as quoted by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.136, cited in A Presocratics Reader, Second Edition, explanatory bracket added).
Second, if the world were merely quantitative (size, shape, weight) along with their arrangements, then the qualities of the world (color, taste, warmth) would be a complete illusion. As Democritus was forced to hold:
By convention, sweet; by convention, bitter; by convention, hot; by convention, cold; by convention, color; but in reality, atoms and void (Democritus as quoted by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.135, cited in A Presocratics Reader, Second Edition).
This led, then, to a third problem: if one’s knowledge of the world comes through the senses (sight, hearing, etc…) and yet if the information from those senses are mere “conventions” divorced from reality, then, in fact, one cannot know anything objective about the external world. As Democritus conceded:
Wretched mind, do you take your evidence from us and then throw us down? Throwing us down is a fall for you! (Democritus, as quoted by Galen, On Medical Experience 15.8, cited in A Presocratics Reader, Second Edition).
Needless to say, these are the same problems contemporary atomists face as well (see the article Science Alone as well as Gravity on the problem of a “void” space).
Democritus’s position is what we would consider today the “Pop-Science” (popular within the scientific community) worldview.
Partly Material, Partly Spiritual
…when philosophy first takes possession of the soul (ψυχὴ) it is entirely fastened and welded to the body (σώματι) and is compelled to regard realities through the body as through prison bars…(Plato, Phaedo, 82e).
Plato, the disciple of Socrates, born in Athens, Greece, had a loftier notion of the world than Democritus.
For Plato, as cited above, man and the world are not just “atoms and void,” there is an immaterial aspect to them, such as “soul” (ψυχὴ, in the Greek) as well as non-material “ideas” (εἶδος, in the Greek).
Plato writes:
…we must agree that one kind is the self-identical Form (εἶδος), ungenerated and indestructible, neither receiving into itself any other from any quarter nor itself passing anywhither into another, invisible and in all ways imperceptible by sense, it being the object which it is the province of Reason to contemplate (Plato, Timaeus, Section 51e-52a).
For Plato, these immaterial ideas, along with being the object of thought, existed in-themselves “beyond heaven” (cf. Phaedrus 247c) and in whose “likeness” an “Artificer” made the natural world (cf. Timaeus, 29a).
The problem with Plato’s worldview, along with being unable to explain the causal-origin of these eternal “ideas,” how they exist “beyond heaven,” yet are at the same time, the enduring cause of the diversity we find beneath “heaven,” also gives an explanation of man that is simply untenable: a spirit trapped in a body.
If Plato is correct, then blind men would have no difficulty knowing “blue,” since knowledge comes from “remembering” (ἀνάμνησις) these eternal ideas (cf. Meno 81d); but blind men do not know blue.
If Plato is correct, then how does the wholly-immaterial soul interact with the wholly-material body? Today, this is known as the famous “interaction problem”: a problem that neither Plato nor contemporary adherents to his body/soul dualism can give an account of.
Contemporarily, this worldview can be termed the “Pop-Culture” view of the world because it gives philosophical support to culturally-acceptable positions like abortion, transgenderism, contraception, homosexuality, etc…all of which presuppose, in their own way, the notion that “I” am not my “body,” but simply “use” the body, as I wish.
Spiritual-Material
The underlying nature is an object of scientific knowledge, by an analogy. For as the bronze is to the statue, the wood to the bed, or the matter and the formless before receiving form to any thing which has form, so is the underlying nature to substance, i.e. the ‘this’ or existent (Aristotle, Physics, Bk. I, Ch. 7).
Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, born in Stagira, Greece, picked up his master’s notion of “ideas” and improved them.
He brought down Plato’s “ideas” (causally) from “heaven” into the visible world, since, for Aristotle, the natural world is something analogous to incarnate-ideas.
Living things (such as man), for Aristotle, were not partly-material/partly-spiritual but wholly spiritual-material. In his words:
…the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life (life, here meaning self-animating) potentially within it (De Anima, Bk. II, Pt. I, explanatory parentheses added).
Thus, with a “flick of the wrist” Aristotle’s Form/Matter, Spiritual-Material (or in technical language, hylomorphic) view of the world definitively solved the problems of his predecessors, as well as, we can say, their present-day disciples.
To the problems Democritus faced, hylomorphism responds:
Truth can exist, because the soul is an immaterial “form” which (being outside the material system, in its intellectual operation) can judge and conform to various external objects, meeting our definition of truth: “conformity between the intellect and the thing known.”
Color and other qualities can be real features of the world because they are “forms” contained within the overarching substance of things. Consequently, men can trust the information received through the senses, and trust that one does have objective knowledge of the external world.
To the problems Plato faced, hylomorphism explains:
A blind man does not know blue, because as a “body/soul composite” man relies on his external senses to acquire knowledge. He also relies on his internal senses to make use of that knowledge.
The “interaction problem” is not a problem after all because man is a body-soul composite (informed-matter) and therefore does not need an explanation to “bridge” the interaction between things that are not substantially distinct.
To the problems faced by contemporary disciples of Democritus & Plato (Pop-Science, and Pop-Culture), hylomorphism can explain:
The qualities, intelligibility, and teleology found in the natural world, contrary to contemporary science (see again the articles, Science Alone, Gravity).
The basis for traditional ethics and anthropology, contrary to contemporary ideologies (see the article: Natural Law).
A Final Thought
The Aristotelian worldview is also, in a foreshadowing way, Eucharistic.
Like the Eucharist, which is substantially Christ and “per accidens” bread, Aristotle’s worldview centers around the co-principles of Substance and Accident, Form and Matter.
What he did not realize (and could not have realized apart from Divine Revelation) was that these forms resided not only in the material world, but also in eternity (like Plato understood, but unlike the understanding of Plato) in the Mind of the Triune God.
Aristotle’s worldview, as assumed and perfected by the Catholic Church, is not only one way among many ways of looking at the world, it is the correct way.
As the Infallible Church teaches:
The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body…The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God – it is not “produced” by the parents – and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection (CCC 365-366).
For more on the immortality of the soul, see the Think Catholic podcast episode: What is the Soul.
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