atomistic approach

atomistic approach People have differing world views, that much is a fact. Of course not all people’s world views are the same and logically speaking, not all people (with differing world views) can be right and hence why we have debates about them. One thing that is important in these debates is to take the effort to try and understand the world-view of another person or people you are debating with and also understand what arguments they have that supports their view. It is no use to try and criticize someone else’s view if you do not understand his/her position in the first place. People have differing views with regards to the following concepts: Matter, change, creation ex nihilo, time, causation, natural laws.

identity, substance, individuality, etc. These concepts at the very core have philosophical and metaphysical implications. So for the next few posts I am going to try and flesh out the Scholastic approach to each of these and other concepts and contrast it with other approaches. At the end of the "interludes" I wish to show how the Scholastic approach can be relevant to scientific discussions especially related to biology. So to start off, let's look at the concept of "matter". There are at least three approaches; Atomistic, Aristotelian and Panpsychist.
The atomistic approach can be summed up to the view that there are two fundamental principles, atoms (Greek = átomos) and the void. Atoms according to this view are indestructible and immutable with the possibility of an infinite variety of shapes and sizes (wiki). These atoms move through the void and the constant mechanical collision,


arrangement and rearrangement of these átomos are what gives rise to the macroscopic elements we observe in reality. The atomistic view of matter gained popularity in the 16th century and gave rise to the "mechanical philosophy" which tried to explain all phenomena entirely in terms of the motion and collision of material bodies. Some might argue that quantum mechanics have shown it to be false while others might argue that quantum vacua or quantum foam are like the void and the elementary and virtual particles correspond to the átomos of atomism. Others might argue that Hilbert space is similar to the void and the points in Hilbert space correspond to the átomos of atomism. Still, others might view the particles, strings and branes of string theory to be analogous to átomos and the worldline, worldsheet and world volume to be akin to the void. The mechanistic-cum-atomistic view of matter is probably the best known and most popular view of matter today and can basically be summed whereby matter can be described as:

atomistic approach