Page 36 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

Once Upon a Time
There Was Darwinism

3 It should be avoided to give a "teleological" (the
idea that they came into being for a purpose) account of na-
ture and living things.
What is striking is that these ideas are not scientific. Neither

Epicurus nor Lucretius conducted scientific experiments or made
observations; they just used logic completely in line with their own
wishes. Moreover, their logic had an interesting starting point.
Epicurus rejected the existence of a Creator, saying that it entailed
belief in an afterlife, for which reason he felt himself circum-
scribed. He clearly stated that his whole philosophy developed
from his unwillingness to accept this proposition. In other words,
Epicurus chose atheism for his own psychological comfort and
later, undertook to construct a worldview based on this choice. For

this reason he endeavored to explain the order of the universe and
the origins of life in terms of an atheist system and with this pur-
pose in mind, adopted ideas that would later prove basic to evolu-
tion.
Benjamin Wiker gives this detailed interpretation of the rela-
tion between Epicurus and Darwin:
The first Darwinian was not Darwin, but a rather notorious Greek,
Epicurus, born on the Island of Samos about 341 B.C. It was he who
provided the philosophical underpinnings of Darwinism, because it
was he who fashioned an entirely materialistic, [atheistic] cosmol-
ogy, where the purposeless jostling of brute matter over infinite
time yielded, by a series of fortunate accidents, not only the Earth,
but all the myriad forms of life thereon. . . .
After stating that Epicurus fashioned the cosmology,
not out of evidence but from his desire to abstract the
world from the idea of a Creator, Wiker goes on
to say:

34