_______________________________________________

             THE LONG WAR AGAINST GOD, CHAPTER 5, PAGE 216

                            Dr. Henry Morris
            _______________________________________________


                                  2000


Milton K. Munitz, professor of philosophy of science at New York
University, summarized the Milesian teachings as follows:

      The type of thinking initiated by the Milesian school of
      pre-Socratic thinkers---Thales, Anaximander and
      Anaximenes---in the sixth century B.C. was carried forward
      in many directions. One of the most remarkable outcomes of
      such speculations, representing a culmination of their
      materialistic thought, was to be found in the Atomist
      school. Originally worked out in its main features by
      Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century B.C., the
      teachings of atomism were later adopted as a basis for the
      primarily ethical philosophy of Epicureanism... It
      elaborates the conception of a universe whose order arises
      out of a blind interplay of atoms rather than as a product
      of deliberate design; of a universe boundless in spatial
      extent, infinite in its duration and containing innumerable
      worlds in various stages of development or decay. It was
      this concept of an infinite and, at bottom, irrational
      universe against which Plato, Aristotle, and the whole
      tradition of theologicaly oriented thought in Western
      culture set themselves in sharp and fundamental opposition.
      It was the same conception, however, which once more came
      into the foregroound of attention at the dawn of modern
      thought and has remained up to the present time an
      inspiration for those modes of scientific thinking that
      renounce any appeal to teleology in the interpretation of
      physical phenomena.[1]

This materialistic philosophy, originating over 2,500 years ago, would
have to be changed very little to conform to the basic ideas of modern
evolutionary cosmogonists. The thoery of evolution is not the epochal
discovery of modern science that modern evolutionists like to proclaim
it to be. It has been around a long, long time!



Footnotes
_________

[1] Munitz, /Theories of the Universe/, p. 6.