Lucretius Book 2: Fun with Atoms

An Eclectic Humanist

In this episode, we continue our exploration of Lucretius's humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. In Book 2, Lucretius begins to explore what it means to live in a Cosmos in which divine interference lays no role and all phenomena are subject to natural laws and naturalistic explanation. Beginning with the smallest objects that can be observed with the naked eye, he leaps inward toward the question of free will and then onward to questions of what current thinkers refer to as emergence—the arising of higher-order behaviours that are not predictable from observing initial conditions and components in complex systems. He offers an explicit discussion of what the divine actually is and why we have no need to worry about it, offers a welcome debunking of the “teleological argument” that the world was made for us or that any intention lies behind our being, and concludes with a refreshing and reasonable argument for the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Not bad for the first century BCE.