Page "religion" Paragraph 243

Music of the spheres

Now this 1920 view of the atom was on the whole a discouraging picture.

For we believed that the electrons obeyed the law of mechanics and electrodynamics ; ;

and therefore the atom was really just a little machine ; ;

and in mechanics the whole is no more than the sum of the parts.

So if you are made of atoms, you are just a big machine ; ;

and since the universe is also made of atoms, it is just a supermachine.

And this would mean that we live in a mechanistic universe, governed by the laws of cause and effect, bound in chains of determinism that hold the universe on a completely predetermined course in which there is not room for soul or spirit or human freedom.

And this is why so many scientists a half a century ago were agnostics or atheists.