If God does not exist there is nothing but the flux of matter. (Materialism). Modern atheism can trace it’s basic principles back to Democritus who argued that reality is defined by atoms and the void, except that it is now updated to molecules and the void. This means that everything is in flux. But if nothing stays the same, no knowledge is possible. Democritus thought that only atoms and the void exist, everything else exists only in thought. But this led him to scepticism concerning knowledge, since it follows that perception through the senses is relative and subjective. “And again, many of the other animals receive impressions contrary to ours; and even to the senses of each individual, things do not always seem the same. Which then, of these impressions are true and which are false is not obvious; for the one set is no more true than the other, but both are alike. And this is why Democritus, at any rate, says that either there is no truth or to us at least it is not evident.’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 4, 1009) “Democritus says: By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void, and also in reality we know nothing, since the truth is at bottom.”[33] ‘You cannot step in the same river twice.’ So why call it a river? Even your thoughts are changing in time and in the course of an argument. Nothing can be pinned down. What then are the persistent conditions for an object - to be what it is? Since entities are merely slices of time, they are only cross-sections of history, bearing no permanency or real identity. ‘This means that all appearance is strictly epiphenomenal .’ (Cunningham, pucsp.br/rever/rv3_2007/t_cunningham.htm) Again this is a reductio ad absurdum. That is why not even Heraclitus the so called ‘father of flux’ was not stupid enough to think that everything was flux. He also believed in a cosmic reason in nature itself which he called ‘the logos’. Fragment 16: ‘When you have listened not to me but to the logos, it is wise within the same logos to say: one is all.’
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:14:03 +0000
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