Ancient Epicurean Atomism, Father of Modern Darwinian Materialism: The So-Called Scientific Worldview

The Greek Atomist Epicurus (341-270 BC) is the father of contemporary scientific Darwinian materialism. The principal tenet of Atomism teaches that the world was not created by any deity, or with any design, but came about by a chance movement of physical atoms of various sizes and magnitude that cemented together and so formed the world.

The world and everything in it were not created but instead the accidental emergent or evolved products of a great cosmic event (exploding Cosmic Egg/Big Bang) that spontaneously generated mystically animated physical matter pregnant with life from nothing. This way of thinking excludes everything unseen, such as the human soul, mind, angels and demons, and holds that humans are aggregates of physical matter in motion in a human form and the human consciousness an active principle of grey matter.

This ancient pagan way of thinking forms the basis of the materialist psychology of Sigmund Freud, Darwin’s evolutionary conception, modern evolutionary biology, secular humanism, secular trans-humanism, Marxist quasi-pantheist and animist dialectical materialism, and John Dewey, co-author of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto and father of progressive education, a leading figure in the ‘dumbing down’ of American schools and the transition of American society away from its founding Biblical heritage in favor of pagan Humanism:

“There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable (unchangeable) truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent moral absolutes…We, of course, say that we do not believe in God (and) eternal morality. That is moral that serves the destruction of the old society. Everything is moral which is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.” (John Dewey, The Unseen Hand, A. Ralph Epperson, p. 298, 378-379) (1)

Though modern materialism originated in the metaphysics of ancient Egyptians and then later Ionians and Stoics during the sixth century BC, it was the Atomists (Leucippus/Democritus, 460-357 BC; Epicurus, 342-270 BC; and Lucretius, 96-55 BC) who methodically developed Atomism, the root and source of modern scientific evolutionary materialism: (2)

“An age of science is necessarily an age of materialism,” declared Hugh Elliot early last century, “Ours is a scientific age, and it may be said with truth that we are all materialists now.” (Darwin Day in America, John G. West, xiv)

Modern materialists such as Julien de la Mettrie (1709-51), Paul Henri Thiery, and Baron D’Holbach (1723-89) all agreed that the human mind is the property of physical matter and man nothing but a bio-machine. La Mettrie speculated that machine-mans rational life is entirely determined by physical causes running the gamut from raw meat, to climate, blood circulation, and gender. Genetic inheritance, said la Mettrie, causes machine-man to commit crime. This view casts parents into the role of “first cause” and would later manifest itself in the belief that State ‘experts,’ or Hillary’s “village” experts should have control of children. (pp. 16-18)

Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) viewed scientific materialism, as not only the pursuit of God-like omniscience but of the Holy Grail itself – power to create a New Man. If an intelligence could grasp “at a given instant…all the forces by which nature is animated” proclaimed Laplace, it could devise a mathematical formula that would predict everything that would ever happen, and “nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.” Scientists should reduce everything in the universe to mechanical laws that could be expressed in terms of mathematics, advised Laplace, for the promise of such knowledge was incredible power…even over life and mind itself. (p. 20)

Herbert Spencer, Fechner, Lotze, Wundt, and the pantheist Ernst Haeckel, inventor of the fraudulent scientism dictum – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – all agreed that life and mind are properties of matter. Haeckel moreover imagined ether to be the primitive life-making substance, which like the primitive fire of the Stoics, changed one part of itself into inert mass while the other part became the active principle, spirit. Today, many scientists routinely resort to Haeckel’s postulate without ever inquiring into its pantheist implications.

Haeckel would later write,

“Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one…pantheism is…an advanced conception of nature (and) a polite form of atheism.” The truth of pantheism, confessed Haeckel, “lies in its destruction of the dualist (twoist) antithesis of God…” The godless oneist world system being constructed, said Haeckel, “substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern scientist.” (Monism, Ernst Haeckel, pantheist net). (emphasis added)

During the century to follow, Charles Darwin (1809-82) helped spread esoteric evolutionary materialism to the masses and eager seminarians and theologians. 

As Stephen Jay Gould argues,

“Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature,” and “the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God (are reduced to) neural complexity.” (Darwin Day in America, p. 41)

According to Darwin, natural selection (energy-god) and the laws of heredity acting on matter produced mind, morality, and civilization. By describing how deified natural mechanisms caused the complexity of life to emerge from deified matter, Darwin helped transform Monist materialism from a fantastically bizarre tale told by power-mad Prometheans on the fringe of society to a hallowed scientism principle enshrined and worshipped by modern scientism and ‘enlightened’ pagan Westerners.

Together, Darwinism and the Epicurean proposition that all that exists is matter in motion within the Void (monism) are the first principles of the naturalistic worldview proffered by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary materialists.

Do you wonder why Progressives and their ilk ignore the Constitution? The answer resides at the level of their materialist view of reality, explained throughout this article. If all that exists is matter in motion and the Void, then the Constitution is meaningless and so are our rights. There can be no truth, no justice, no meaning, and no purpose, where there is only change due to matter in motion. Nor can there be only men and women in the face of matter in motion. And what about humans? What are they if all that exists is matter in motion? Obviously, we are nothing but aggregates of matter without humanity, freedom, and rights.

As early as 1926, President Calvin Coolidge was aware of and deeply concerned by the insidious spread of so-called ‘scientific’ materialism in America. As he knew, Americans are free only because of the Christian foundation laid by the country’s founders.

In a speech he delivered in Philadelphia, July 5, 1926 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Coolidge tried to call American’s back to their Christian heritage. He told Americans that the Declaration’s principles of liberty arise from man’s God-given inalienable rights. And these are found, said Coolidge, “in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy…” The clergy preached equality “because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” Sanctity of life, the right to self-defense, and all the rest of our individual liberties were justified “by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.” God’s children therefore, have no “superiors;” there are no modern-day “divine rights kings” who possess “any right to rule…over them.” Americans are free to choose their own leaders.

The Declaration, continued Coolidge, is “a great spiritual document.” Its principles are not material but spiritual. “Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements we can see and touch. They are ideals(whose) source and roots (are) in religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world.”

President Coolidge cautioned Americans that, “unless the faith of the Americans in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we abandon the cause.”

Coolidge ended his speech with a stark warning, “We must not sink into a pagan materialism…” (Back Fired, William Federer, pp. 269-271)

Ideas have consequences, but worldview ideas can have tremendous consequences for good—humanity, freedom, and rights—or for evil–subhuman aggregates of matter, slavery, and genocide. This nation was founded on Christian presuppositions that allowed for the most enlightened, freest civilization in the history of the world. The usurpation of our founding worldview by Progressivism’s evil matter in motion worldview, the so-called scientific Darwinian materialist worldview, is sending our homeland over the edge of the abyss into hell.

2024@Linda