The Case for God Read Online Free

during their trade missions, may have regarded traditional Greek
mythos
more dispassionately than was possible on the mainland. They wanted to show that thunderbolts and lightning were not arbitrary whims of Zeus but expressions of fundamental physical laws. The
phusikoi
were beginning to think differently from other people. Their talent for working things out independently and logically may have been encouraged by the political organization of the
polis
, the city-state, in which every citizen had to participate in the deliberations of the Assembly. Because the polis was ruled by impersonal, uniform laws, the Greeks were learning to ferret out abstract, general principles instead of reaching for immediate, short-term solutions. Their democracy may also have inspired the naturalists to develop a more egalitarian cosmology, so that they saw the physical elements of the universe evolving according to inherent natural principles, independently of a monarchical creator. But we must not exaggerate their egalitarianism. Greek aristocrats led extremely privileged lives. TheWestern pursuit of disinterested, scientific truth was rooted in a way of life that depended upon the institution of slavery and the subjugation of women. From the beginning, science, like religion, had its ambiguities and shadows. 4
    At the same time as it sought to emancipate itself from the older worldview, the new naturalism was also affected by traditional ideas. Thales (fl. c. 580), the earliest of the
phusikoi
, may have been influenced by the
mythos
of the primal Sea when he argued that water was the original ingredient of the universe. The only sentence of his work to have survived is “Everything is water and the world is full of gods.” But unlike the poets and mythmakers, Thales felt compelled to find the reason why water had been the primordial stuff. Water was indispensable to life; it could change its form, becoming ice or steam, and so had the capacity to evolve into something different. But Thales’s scientific naturalism did not lead him to jettison religion; he still saw the world as “full of gods.” In a similar vein, Anaximenes (c. 560–496) believed that the
arche
was air, which was even more fundamental to life than water and had transmuted itself from a purely ethereal substance into matter by coagulating progressively into wind, clouds, water, earth, and rock.
    Anaximander (610–556) took another approach. He believed that the naturalist must go beyond sense data and look for an
arche
that was entirely different from any of the beings we know. The cosmos must have emerged from a larger entity that contained all subsequent beings in embryo. He called it the
apeiron
, the “indefinite,” because it had no qualities of its own and was, therefore, indefinable. It was infinite, divine (but not a mere god), and the source of all life. By means of a process that Anaximander was unable to explain satisfactorily, individual beings had “separated out” from the
apeiron
. A seed had broken away and grown into a cold, damp mass that became the earth. Then, like a tree shedding its bark, the
apeiron
had sloughed off rings of fire, each surrounded by thick mist, which had encircled the earth. Without empirical proof, this was little more than fantasy, but Anaximander understood that the scientist could throw light on the unknown only if he laid aside conventional modes of thought.
    When Miletus was conquered by the Persians at the end of the sixth century, the scientific capital moved to Elea, a Greek colony insouthern Italy. Here Parmenides developed a radical skepticism. How could we know that the way we analyzed the cosmos bore any relation to the reality itself? 5 Were the laws and phenomena that we thought we observed real and objective, or did they merely explain the few aspects of the world that we were able to see? Parmenides became convinced that to attain the truth, human reason must rise above common sense and unverified opinion.