Atoms Never Built a House

People who will not allow that the world was made by divine providence say one of two things. Either it is put together out of first elements that met each other at random, or it came into being all at once by nature — nature having in itself, as Straton holds, the power to bring things into being and the power to make them dwindle, while having neither perception nor shape of its own. On that account everything is supposed to have come about on its own, with no craftsman and no author behind it. Both opinions are empty and impossible. But this is what happens to people who do not know the truth: they will invent anything rather than see what the case itself requires. So begin with those tiny seeds whose meeting together is supposed to have produced the whole world. I ask where they are and where they come from. Who has ever seen them? Who has ever felt them? Who has ever heard them? Did nobody have eyes but Leucippus? Was he the only man with a mind — he who was, of all men, the one blind and senseless one, since he said things that no sick man could have come out with in his raving, or any sleeper in his dreams? [a]

The older philosophers held that everything is made up of four elements. He would not accept that, in case he should look as though he were walking in other men’s footsteps. He held instead that the elements themselves have first components, which can neither be seen nor touched nor picked up by any part of the body. They are so small, he says, that there is no edge of a sword fine enough to cut and divide them; and from that he gave them the name of atoms. But it struck him that if they all had one and the same nature, they could not make up objects as different and as varied as the ones we see in the world. So he said that some of them are smooth and some rough, some round, some angular, some hooked. How much better it would have been to keep quiet than to have a tongue for such miserable, empty uses! Indeed, I am afraid that anyone who thinks such things worth refuting will look no less mad himself. Still, let us answer him as if he were saying something to the point. If they are smooth and round, plainly they cannot take hold of one another so as to make a body — just as, if a man wanted to bind millet seed into a single mass, the very smoothness of the grains would not let them come together into a lump. And if they are rough and angular and hooked, so that they can hold on to each other, then they are divisible and can be cut; for hooks and angles have to stick out, and so can be cut off.

Whatever can be cut off and torn away can also be seen and handled. But he says: “These flutter about with restless motions through empty space and are carried this way and that, just as we see little specks of dust in the sun when it has let its rays and its light in through a window. From these come trees and plants and all the fruits of the earth; from these come animals, and water, and fire, and everything is produced, and everything is broken down into them again.” This can be put up with as long as the question is about small matters. But the world itself, too, was made up of them. Here he has reached the outer limit of perfect madness; it seems impossible that anything further could be said, and yet he found something to add. “Since everything is infinite,” he says, “and no part of it can be left empty, it follows of necessity that there are worlds beyond counting.” What force could the atoms have had, that masses so incalculable were collected out of such minute pieces? And first of all I ask what the nature or the origin of those seeds is. For if everything comes from them, where are we to say that they themselves come from? What nature supplied such a stock of material for making worlds beyond counting? But let us allow him to rave about worlds and go unpunished; let us speak about this world, the one we are in and can see. He says that everything is made out of minute bodies that cannot be divided.

If that were so, nothing would ever need seed of its own kind. Birds would be born without eggs, or eggs would come into being without being laid; the other living creatures would breed without mating; trees and the crops of the earth would not have their own seed, which we handle and sow every day. Why does a field of grain come up out of grain, and grain again out of a field of grain? In fact, if the meeting and gathering of atoms brought everything about, everything would grow together up in the air, since atoms flit about through empty space. Why can no plant, no tree, no grain arise or grow without earth, without roots, without moisture, without seed? From this it is plain that nothing is made out of atoms, since everything has its own fixed nature, its own seed, its own law given it from the beginning. And in the end Lucretius, as if he had forgotten the atoms he was defending, used the following arguments to refute people who say that things are produced out of nothing — arguments that could have been brought against himself. This is how he put it:

And then a little later:

Who would think the man had a brain in his head, saying this and not seeing that his two statements contradict each other? That nothing is made by means of atoms is clear from just this — that everything has a fixed seed of its own. Unless, of course, we are to believe that fire and water get their nature from atoms too. Why should I mention that when materials of the greatest hardness are struck together with a violent blow, fire is struck out of them? Are there atoms hidden in the steel, or in the flint? Who shut them in there? Why do they not leap out on their own? Or how could seeds of fire stay inside a material as cold as that?

I let the flint and steel go. Hold a globe of crystal filled with water up to the sun, and fire is kindled from the light thrown back off the water, even in the sharpest cold. Are we then to believe that fire is held inside the water? And yet the sun by itself will not kindle fire, even in summer. Breathe on wax, or let a light vapor touch something — a facing of marble, say, or a plate of metal — and water gathers on it little by little in the tiniest drops. In the same way mist is formed out of what rises off the land or the sea; and either it spreads out and wets whatever it has covered, or it collects, is carried up by the wind to high mountains, is packed into cloud, and sends down heavy rain. Where, then, are we to say the water is made? In the vapor? In what rises off the ground? In the wind? But nothing can be formed in something that is neither touched nor seen. Why should I speak of animals, in whose bodies we can see nothing made without plan, without arrangement, without use, without beauty — so that the skill and care of the laying-out of every part and limb shuts out the idea of accident and chance? But let us suppose it possible that the limbs and bones and sinews and blood are made up of atoms. What about the senses, the reflection, the memory, the mind, the natural capacity? Out of what seeds can they be fitted together? He says: out of the smallest ones of all. Then there are others that are larger. How, in that case, are any of them indivisible?

Next: if the things that are not seen are formed from invisible seeds, it follows that the things that are seen are formed from visible ones. Why, then, does nobody see them? And whether a man looks at the invisible parts that are in a human being or at the parts that can be touched and seen, who does not see that both of them exist according to a design? How, then, can bodies that meet each other without design produce anything that has reason in it? For we see that there is nothing in the whole world that does not have in itself a very great and wonderful design. And since this is above the perception and the capacity of a human being, to what can it more rightly be credited than to the divine providence? If a statue, a mere likeness of a man, is made by the use of design and skill, are we to suppose that man himself is made up of fragments that came together at random? And how close to the real thing is the thing a man fashions, when the greatest and most surpassing skill can copy nothing more than the shadow and the outermost lines of a body? Was human skill ever able to give what it made any motion or any feeling? I say nothing about the working of sight, of hearing, of smell, and the wonderful uses of the other parts, whether the ones in plain view or the ones hidden away. What craftsman could have manufactured a man’s heart, or his voice, or his very wisdom? Does any man in his right mind, then, think that what a human being cannot do by reason and judgment can be brought off by a meeting of atoms sticking to one another every which way? You see what foolish ravings they have fallen into, all because they are unwilling to assign the making and the care of everything to God.

But let us grant them that earthly things are made out of atoms. Are the heavenly things made of them too? They say that the gods are undefiled, eternal and blessed, and they grant the gods alone an exemption, so that the gods should not turn out to be built up from a meeting of atoms. For if the gods too had been made of them, they would be liable to be scattered, the seeds coming apart in the end and going back to their own nature. So then, if there is something the atoms could not produce, why should we not judge the same way about everything else? But I ask why the gods did not build themselves a dwelling place before those first elements produced the world. Clearly, unless the atoms had come together and made the sky, the gods would still be hanging in the middle of empty space. By what decision, then, by what plan did the atoms collect themselves out of a confused heap, so that from some of them the earth below was shaped into a globe and the sky stretched out above, decorated with such a variety of constellations that nothing more ornamented can be imagined? Can a man who sees objects so great and so many suppose that they were made without any design, without any providence, without any divine intelligence — that things so great and so wonderful arose out of fine, minute atoms? Is it not something like a portent that there should be any human being who would say these things, or any who would believe them: Democritus, who sat and listened to him, or Epicurus, into whom every folly flowed out of the fountain of Leucippus?

But others say the world was made by Nature, which has neither perception nor shape. This is far more absurd. If Nature made the world, it must have made it with judgment and intelligence; for the one who makes something is the one who has either the will to make it or the knowledge of how. If Nature has neither perception nor shape, how can something be made by it that has both? Unless perhaps a man thinks that the frame of animals, which is so delicate, could have been formed and given life by something with no perception at all; or that the shape of the heavens, prepared with such foresight for the uses of living creatures, suddenly came into being by some accident or other, with no builder and no craftsman.

Chrysippus says: “If there is anything that does what a human being, endowed with reason though he is, cannot do, then that thing is certainly greater and stronger and wiser than a human being.” But a human being cannot make heavenly things. Therefore whatever will produce them, or has produced them, surpasses a human being in art, in design, in skill and in power. Who, then, can it be but God? As for Nature, which they take to be a sort of mother of everything: if it has no mind it will bring nothing about and contrive nothing, for where there is no reflection there is neither motion nor effect. But if it uses deliberation to begin a thing, reason to arrange it, skill to carry it out, energy to finish it, and power to govern and hold it, why should it be called Nature rather than God? Or if a crowd of atoms, or Nature without a mind, made the things we see, then I ask why it was able to make the sky but unable to make a city or a house. Why did it make mountains of marble but not make columns and statues? Surely the atoms ought to have come together to bring these things about as well, since they leave no arrangement untried. As for Nature, which has no mind, it is no wonder that it forgot to do them. What, then, is the truth of the matter? Plainly this. When God began this work of the world — and nothing can be better arranged for order, or more fitting for use, or more adorned for beauty, or greater in bulk — he himself made the things that could not be made by a human being. Among them he made the human being himself, to whom he gave a share of his own wisdom and whom he furnished with reason, as much of it as earthly frailty was able to hold, so that a man might make for himself the things his own uses required.

But if in what we may call the commonwealth of this world there is no providence in charge and no God running it, then no perception at all holds sway in this nature of things. Where, in that case, will the human mind, with its skill and its intelligence, be believed to have got its origin? For if a man’s body was made out of the ground — which is where his name came from — then it follows that the soul, which has intelligence and rules the body, which the limbs obey as they obey a king and commander, which can neither be looked at nor grasped, cannot have come to a man from anywhere but a wise nature. And as mind and soul govern every body, so God governs the world. For it is not likely that the lesser and lowlier things should hold rule while the greater and highest things do not.

In short, Marcus Cicero says, in his Tusculan Disputations and in his Consolation: “No origin of souls can be found on earth. There is nothing, he says, mixed or compounded in souls, nothing that might look as though it were produced and put together out of the earth; nothing moist or airy or of the nature of fire. In those natures there is nothing that has the power of memory, of mind and reflection — nothing that both keeps hold of the past and foresees the future and is able to take in the present. Those powers alone are divine. No source will ever be found from which they could come to a human being, unless it is from God.” So then, apart from two or three empty slanderers, it is agreed that the world is governed by providence, as it was also made by providence; and there is nobody who dares to prefer the opinion of Diagoras and Theodorus, or the empty invention of Leucippus, or the frivolity of Democritus and Epicurus, to the authority of those seven men of old who were called wise, or of Pythagoras, or of Socrates or Plato, or of the other philosophers who judged that there is a providence. And so the other opinion is false as well — the one that holds that religion was set up by wise men to produce terror and fear, so that ignorant people would keep away from doing wrong.

For if that were true, it would follow that we are being laughed at by the wise men of old. And if they invented religion in order to deceive us — to deceive the whole human race, no less — then they were not wise, since falsehood does not fit the character of a wise man. But grant that they were wise: what a triumph of lying it must have been, to take in not only the unlearned but Plato as well, and Socrates, and to fool Pythagoras, Zeno and Aristotle, the heads of the greatest schools, as easily as that. There is, therefore, a divine providence, just as the men I have named perceived; and by its energy and power everything we see was both made and is governed. For a structure of things so vast, an arrangement and a regularity that keep the settled orders and seasons, could not have arisen in the first place without a craftsman who planned ahead, nor have lasted so many ages without a powerful occupant, nor have been governed without a break by a ruler who was skilled and aware. Reason itself declares it. For whatever exists that has reason must have arisen from reason. And reason is what belongs to an intelligent and wise nature, and a wise and intelligent nature can be nothing else than God. Now the world, since it has reason, by which it is both governed and held together, was therefore made by God. And if God is the maker and ruler of the world, then religion is rightly and truly established; for honor and worship are owed to the author and common parent of all things.