Have
you ever visited a ghost town, ancient ruins or once famous building,
long since abandoned? What was it like then and now? (Serendipity
Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page 1310).
The
concept that matter is composed of discrete units and cannot be
divided into arbitrarily tiny quantities has been around for
millennia, but these ideas were founded in abstract, philosophical
reasoning rather than experimentation and empirical observation. The
nature of atoms in philosophy varied considerably over time and
between cultures and schools, and often had spiritual elements.
Nevertheless, the basic idea of the atom was adopted by scientists
thousands of years later because it elegantly explained new
discoveries in the field of chemistry.[8] The ancient name of "atom"
from atomism had already been nearly universally used to describe
chemical atoms by that time, and it was therefore retained as a term,
long after chemical atoms were found to be divisible, and even after
smaller, truly indivisible particles were identified.
References
to the concept of atoms date back to ancient Greece and India. In
India, the Ājīvika, Jain, and Cārvāka schools of atomism may date
back to the 6th century BCE.[9] The Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools
later developed theories on how atoms combined into more complex
objects.[10] In the West, the references to atoms emerged in the 5th
century BCE with Leucippus, whose student, Democritus, systematized
his views. In approximately 450 BCE, Democritus coined the term
átomos (Greek: ἄτομος), which means "uncuttable" or
"the smallest indivisible particle of matter". Although the
Indian and Greek concepts of the atom were based purely on
philosophy, modern science has retained the name coined by
Democritus.[8] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom).
Democritus in ancient Greece coined the term "atom". No question, based on man’s present knowledge centuries later there is a sense in which he was dead wrong….but also a nagging sense in which he was uncannily conceptually right on. We must admit even today that his thoughts (given allowance for aspects of knowledge inaccessible to him) were noteworthy.
Sometimes
I wonder what structures we map out today people years hence will say
“In a sense they were dead wrong, but in a another sense right on.”
A thousand years hence, they will generously excuse us for not
having knowledge inaccessible to us now and refrain from quibbling
about this when they find a basic idea useful.
In
my view, a principal candidate for this involves the spiritual
aspects of mankind. I look forward to the day when faith and belief
in the Fruit of the Spirit will be verifiable as absolute based upon
real phenomena simply inaccessible to current tools of understanding.
For example, one Sunday morning I heard a young layman illustrate to
children regarding spiritual matters that we are something like radio
receivers receiving guidance from God and the Holy Spirit. You may
think this illustration ludicrously corny, but the idea could well
prove to be basically right even though our idea of ”receiver”
will be shown to be hugely outdated and grossly oversimplified in the
light of more complete understandings.
