 |  |
| Left: a 2015 cover to Libb Thims' draft stage Morality Squared, wherein religion is dissolved in nitric acid, as Ludwig Feuerbach famously proclaimed would happen one day. Right: an annotated cover to the 1996 French-Italian film adaptation of Goethe's Elective Affinities. Both visuals of physico-chemical atheism, i.e. human interactions described via physical chemistry, pure, applied, and WITHOUT any god theory, god hypotheses (see: Napoleon Laplace anecdote), or god belief. | |
Overview
In c.450BC, Empedocles taught atheism (see: atheism professor) based on the premise that all things can be explained in terms of two forces and four elements; which he socially described via the logic that friend mix like water and wine, whereas enemies separate like oil and water.
In 1809, Goethe, building on the earlier proto physiochemical atheism logic of Empedocles, and using the modern physical chemistry textbook A Dissertation on Elective Attractions, by Torbern Bergman, as a basis, penned his Elective Affinities, which explained the passions and morals of human reactions via god-disabused chemical affinity theory, aka the moral symbols of physical chemistry. Goethe then trained Arthur Schopenhauer in this art, and the works of Schopenhauer later intellectually trained Friedrich Nietzsche; and the works of Goethe trained Ludwig Buchner and Wilhelm Ostwald.
Types
See main: Atheism types by denial and beliefThe following, ordered by power ranking, are the main types of physicochemical atheism:
1. Thimsian atheism
2. Buchnerian atheism
3. Ostwaldian atheism
4. Schopenhauerian atheism
5. Freudian atheism
6. Goetheanism
(add)
Quotes
The following are related quotes:
“In the course of these seven years the philosophic development of the individual, preserving its correspondence with that of the race, will pass through its last phase. As the pupil passed before from ‘fetichism’ to ‘polytheism’, so he will now pass, as spontaneously, into ‘monotheism’, induced by the influence on his imaginative powers which hitherto have been supreme, of the spirit of discussion. No interference should be offered to this metaphysical transition, which is the homage that he pays to the necessary conditions under which mankind arrives at truth. There is something in this provisional phase which evidently harmonizes well with the abstract and independent character of mathematics, with which the two first years of the seven are occupied. As long as more attention is given to deduction than to induction, the mind cannot but retain a leaning to metaphysical theories. Under their influence the student will soon reduce his primitive theology to ‘deism’ of a more or less distinct kind and this during his physicochemical studies will most likely degenerate into a species of ‘atheism’; which last phase, under the enlightening influence of biological and still more of sociological knowledge, will be finally replaced by ‘positivism’. Thus, at the time fixed for the ultimate study of moral science, each new member of humanity will have been strongly impressed by personal experience, with a sense of historical filiation, and will be enabled to sympathize with his ancestors and contemporaries, while devoting his practical energies to the good of his successors.”— Auguste Comte (1848), A General View of Positivism [1]
See also
● Atheism terminology
● Atheism types
References
1. Comte, Auguste. (1848). A General View of Positivism (pgs. 131-32). Robert Speller, 1851.
