Sunday Zoom - July 6, 2025 - 12:30 PM ET - Topic: The Universe Is Infinite In Size And Eternal In Time

As with last week, let's go down the list of major doctrines we focus on at EpicureanFriends, and discuss the implications of the universe being infinite in size and eternal in time - primarily how they serve to support the Epicurean contention that the universe was not created or ruled over by supernatural forces.

Again as with last week, we'll also tend to questions and other topics that participants would like to discuss.

Please join us if you can. If you're not on our current invitation list, let us know in this thread that you'd like to attend future sessions.

Classical Epicurean Philosophy - Epicureanfriends.com

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Robert - You are level 3 and very welcome to attend. We'll add you to the private conversation which has the link. Check your conversations in the next hour or so and a thread for the Zoom should appear there for you.

When we were discussing yesterday the possibility that Epicurus held that there might not be only an infinite number of worlds, but an infinite number of people like us, I could not remember the citation to the proposition that never creates only a single thing of a kind. Here's that reference now,

Lucretius 2 - 10277

Quote

If there is so great a store of seeds as the whole life of living things could not number, and if the same force and nature abides which could throw together the seeds of things, each into their place in like manner as they are thrown together here, you must confess that there are other worlds in other regions, and diverse races of men and tribes of wild beasts. In the universe there is nothing single, nothing born unique and growing unique and alone, but it is always of some tribe, and there are many things in the same race. First of all turn your mind to living creatures; you will find that in this direction is begotten the race of wild beasts that haunts the mountains, in this direction the stock of men, in this direction again the dumb herds of scaly fishes, and all the bodies of flying fowls. Wherefore you must confess in the same way that sky and earth and sun, moon, sea, and all else that exists, are not unique, but rather numberless; inasmuch as the deep-fixed boundary-stone of life awaits these as surely, and they are just as much of a body that has birth, as every race which is here on earth, abounding in things after its kind.

- Lucretius, Book 2:1077

It caught my eye that this is another of the places in Lucretius which appears to refer to a "deep-set boundary mark," and I wanted to see if that terminology was an attempt at poetry by modern translators or what. Here's the interlinear version from nodictionaries.com. That "depango terminus" does seem to justify something similar: