ABSTRACT
Atomism originated in ancient Greece as a system of philosophy that explained all physical phenomena in terms of the behavior and interaction of vanishingly small indivisible particles. The emphasis on indivisibility (always a thorny philosophical issue) later gave way to a stress on the particulate nature of matter far below the level of sensory detection. These later manifestations of atomism should more correctly be referred to as, say, “corpuscularism” (to use a favored seventeenth-century term) since the very word “atomism” comes from the Greek word for “indivisible” (atomos). Nevertheless, the term will be used loosely here to refer to theories that explain qualitative differences between bodies and all other physical phenomena by means of the order and arrangement, orientations, shapes, and movements of submicroscopic particles. Although atomism has had immense success as an explanatory system of natural philosophy (even our own physical and chemical sciences are based on an atomic theory of matter), it has frequently clashed with Christianity. There are two main reasons for this. First, from its beginnings atomism included an account of world-building in which the multiplicity of things was explained by the richly varied coming together of atoms “by necessity” (we would say, “in accordance with laws of nature”), but which seemed to early Christians to be “by chance.” Second, the major advocate of atomism was the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), whose closely associated moral philosophy and nonprovidential theology were vigorously condemned by Christians.
