Chapter 19 <matter destroyed>

As early as in ancient times, materialists believed that the world is material, everything in the world is composed of atoms, and that atoms are the smallest indecomposable particles of matter.At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the great development of natural science and experimental industry, people discovered that atoms are composed of electrons smaller than it, and realized that atoms are not indivisible material units. At this time, some idealists came out to attack materialism, saying that atoms were dematerialized and atoms were eliminated. Their reasons were:

The discovery of electrons shows that the smallest indivisible particles that make up matter do not exist, so matter disappears. Human beings' understanding of anything, including atoms, is fundamentally determined by the level of practice and develops with the development of practice.Due to different practical conditions, people will form different understandings even for the same thing. The discovery of atoms does not prove that matter is destroyed, it just shows that metaphysical materialists' concept of atoms is unscientific, and it only shows that metaphysical materialists' concept of atoms can no longer exist, while matter is eternal and indestructible.

From a logical point of view, the above-mentioned idealists have made the mistake of confusing concepts, that is, they equate people's knowledge of things with the things they know.They grasped the metaphysical materialist's erroneous understanding of the properties of atoms, and drew the conclusion that matter has disappeared, which is quite absurd. Can we assert that something does not exist based on someone's incomplete or even completely wrong understanding of it?