Читать книгу How to Be an Epicurean - Catherine Wilson - Страница 14

Many of us were taught in school, or at least came away with the impression, that until Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, ‘everybody’ believed that the world had been created by a divinity in seven days, that Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and that Noah’s Ark housed all the originally created animals. This is incorrect. Although Christianity and Judaism share this account, and although the Islamic account is similar to it, the other major religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism, have their own accounts, and stories about how the world came to be are found in every culture on earth.

Further, the ancient Greek philosophers who preceded the Epicureans imagined the origins of the universe and its inhabitants in very different ways, as arising, for example, from the interactions of Love and Strife. Intriguingly, the ancient Epicureans themselves grasped the basic principle of what Darwin later called ‘natural selection’, anticipating some elements of his theory of evolution without having any real notion of the time scales involved and without understanding how one species could possibly give rise to another.

The Epicureans proposed that combinations of atoms taking the form of animals developed by chance or from atomic ‘seeds’ buried in the earth. Animals with features that favoured their survival, such as cunning, courage and speed, were able to persist longer than others that lacked these features. Over time, animals whose internal structure happened to create copy-creating copies of themselves arose by chance. If nature hadn’t stumbled on such devices in the distant past, we wouldn’t be around to observe other living things and to have thoughts about the origins of life. ‘I am anxious that you should carefully avoid the mistake,’ Lucretius says, ‘of supposing that the lustrous eyes were created to enable us to see; or that the tapering shins and thighs were attached to the feet as a base to enable us to walk.’ All such explanations, he adds, ‘are propounded preposterously with topsy-turvy reasoning … Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes.’

This position was long ridiculed as absurd. The ‘random concourse of atoms’, it was alleged, could never have produced functioning living bodies and the regular movements of the heavenly bodies. But thanks to its perceived absurdity, it remained a target of criticism and stayed fresh in the minds of philosophers.

It is not so difficult to believe that the geological features of the earth appeared on account of the laws of physics and chemistry, that no intelligent being had to design them and make them. But life, in its complexity and diversity, has always posed much more of an explanatory problem. How could roses, peacocks and tigers, not to mention human beings, have come into the world through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? How could not only structure, but behaviour, such as the ability to build hives composed of hexagonal cells, as bees do, or the ability to use the stars for orientation in migration, as birds do, have arisen from the unguided motion of atoms in the void? These animals seem to have been intentionally fashioned to be beautiful and adorn the world, or to be good hunters or flyers, or producers of useful foodstuffs for us.

The creative action of God was compared in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions to the activity of fashioning a figure or a pot from clay; references to the ‘hand’ or ‘hands’ and ‘finger’ of God are frequent in our literature. As the ancient painter took over where the ancient potter left off, and decorated the pot with the figures of birds, animals and humans, so God was thought of as making and embellishing the world. The theory of divine creation became more rather than less plausible in the period of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution when the intricacies of the bodies of insects and the tissues of other animals were first revealed by the microscope and when the ‘mechanics’ of the human body, considered to be a kind of hydraulic system working by the pressure of blood, lymph and cerebrospinal fluids in its vessels, began to be worked out. An argument widely considered irrefutable, and frequently presented in the 18th century, went more or less as follows: if I were to find a watch lying in the sand on a beach, I would never suppose that it had come into existence just by chance, or thanks to the laws of physics. And I would not expect a watch to produce little watches. Obviously, such a contrivance had to have been made by an intelligent being that had a purpose in mind, namely telling the time.

The same thought would have occurred to anyone in the early 19th century who stumbled on a woollen mill in a clearing in the woods, or anyone in the 20th century who encountered an automobile factory that turned sheets of steel and other materials into functional cars. Watches, mills and factories have to be carefully thought out and put together by a group of intelligent and capable beings – or by one extremely intelligent and extremely capable being – to succeed in doing what they do.

Animals somewhat resemble watches, mills and factories. Like watches, they have a lot of small moving parts. Like mills and factories, they transform inert basic materials – air, food and water – into functioning tissues and organs. Their individual parts work together in an integrated, harmonious manner to make life and reproduction possible, as the springs and wheels of the watch or the various components of the mill or factory function to turn the hands on the dial or deliver blankets, shawls and cars. The conclusion that animals – the first prototypes, at least – had been designed and created by a supernatural being looked inescapable.

The ancient Epicureans were not impressed by the argument that integration and harmony always imply a mastermind creator or a team working closely together with oversight of the whole process of manufacture. But as watches and automobile factories were in their time unknown, no one was around to present to them the argument that such complex and well-functioning things can’t make themselves or appear by chance. If they had been confronted with such arguments, they might have insisted that a watch or a factory could arise through the chance combination of atoms. But I suspect they would have had to agree that it is probably impossible for a watch or a factory to assemble by chance. For this to happen, the various components would have to stick together and start to interact in just the right way. And to imagine a fly or a mouse or an elephant coming to be in this way strains credulity too far. Isn’t this like expecting (as 20th-century critics of evolutionary theory used to argue) monkeys with typewriters to produce the plays of Shakespeare?

This was a stumbling block that seemed to give the advantage to Creationism.

I can well understand that a person brought up on the Genesis story of the creation of the universe in seven days and sitting in the classroom listening to a lecture on how Darwin discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection would be sceptical about his supposed achievement. Such a person might reasonably wonder: how could just one scientist in the 19th century looking at finch beaks in the Galapagos, and talking to pigeon breeders in England, prove that we evolved over hundreds of millions of years from apes and monkeys, which in turn evolved from something like fish and worms?

Even if you favour the Darwinian view over the Genesis story, it is good to remember that, on the face of it, it is somewhat implausible. But conversely, if you find Darwinism implausible, it is helpful to stop thinking of Darwin as suddenly and single-handedly coming up with a new and startling theory for which there is still no conclusive evidence. You can think of him instead as one of a long line of thinkers familiar with Epicurean philosophy who found the way over its major stumbling blocks where the theory of natural selection was concerned.