Natural Philosophy of the Ancient Creeks Thales of Miletus, c. 625~545 B.C., doubtless came across the creation stories of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, in both of which water featured as the primeval chaos, for he supposed that all things came from water in the beginning. The earth, he supposed, was a cylinder or a disc with water below, on which it floated, and with waters above, from which the rains came. In the philosophies of Thales and the other Ionian Greeks nature became more impersonal than it had been in the bronze-age cosmologies. The ancient Greek philosophers tended to remove gods from nature, supposing that the heavenly bodies were solid material objects, not powerful personalized beings. In a complementary way, their approximate contemoporaries, the Hebrew, Amos, the Persian, Zoraster, and the Indian, Buddha, separated their gods from nature. These religeous reformers minimized the roles assigned to the gods in the bronze-age civilizations, the tasks of making rain and providing a good harvest, and indicated that the gods were concerned primarily with the spiritual welfrare of men. Hence the old gods became more abstract and spiritual, just as the world of the Greeks became more impersonal and material.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 11:10:18 +0000
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