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Dr. Jonathan Miller, for example, a distinguished physician and theater and opera director, is uneasy with the term for this reason: “I do not have,” he once told me, “a special word for saying that I do not believe in the tooth fairy or in Santa Claus. I presume that my intelligent friends do not suppose that I believe such things.”
De Rerum Naturum
Now, for the rest, lend ears unstopped, and the intellect’s keen edge; Severed from cares, attend to a true philosophical system; Lest it should hap that my gifts which I zealously set forth before you,
One apprehension assails me here, that haply you reckon Godless the pathway you tread which leads to the Science of Nature As to the highroad of sin. But rather how much more often Has that same vaunted Religion brought forth deeds sinful and godless.
Afterwards we shall more rightly discern the thing which we search for:— Both out of what it is that everything can be created, And in what way all came, without help of gods, into being.
If out of nothing things sprang into life, then every species From all alike could be born, and none would need any seed-germ.
Could any matrix for matter exist that is fixed and unchanging? But, as it is, since all from definite seeds are created, Therefore each is born and comes into regions of daylight From out the place where dwells its substance, the primary atoms. Thus each cannot spring from all in promiscuous fashion,
That from appropriate atoms each creature grows great and is nourished.
And do you think that unto such as you, A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew, God gave the Secret, and denied it me?— Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.
Anything that excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.
