Origins: Reasons to Believe

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It was a tidy way to explain reality. For the early Greeks, the events of the world were caused by the Olympian gods. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena and the rest looked like humans, but they were more beautiful, they never fell sick or died, and they had better food and drink. They could make things happen—floods, storms, plagues, droughts—and they could prevent things from happening.

Since Poseidon causes earthquakes, if an earthquake destroys your house, Poseidon is probably angry with you. Maybe you did something to offend him; for example, after Odysseus blinded Poseidon’s son, the cyclops Polyphemus, the god kept Odysseus’s ships at sea for years, preventing him from returning to Ithaca. Or maybe an ancestor of yours or your local prince offended him and he is taking revenge on the entire city (your house included). Or maybe he is just carrying out his side of a bargain with another god. The world is unpredictable and often out of our control; events frequently seem chaotic and random. The gods of Olympus are convenient scapegoats.

This began to change as the Greeks encountered the high civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia—different peoples who worshiped different gods and had different ideas about how the world works. Some inquisitive Greeks saw that there was no objective reason to suppose that their traditions were truer than the traditions of their neighbors to the east and south, and they were willing to learn from these civilizations. By the sixth century B.C., the Greeks had already taken the alphabet from the Phoenicians and adapted it to their own language; they had imported foreign motifs in art and architecture; they had followed the Lydians, their neighbors in western Anatolia, in using coined money. So it should be no surprise that foreign contact also brought new possibilities for understanding the world and the gods.

The problem, however, is that the different cosmologies conflicted with one another. It was not so easy to take one idea from here and another from there, and simply add the foreign gods to the Greek pantheon and believe that all the different and incompatible accounts of the world are equally true. Were they to choose one cosmology over the rest, or to reject them all as fictions and propose something new? And if they proposed something new, wouldn’t that be just another fiction—a story no one has even heard of, let alone believed?

In making this choice, the Greeks were forced not only to take sides but to give reasons for their 007decisions. And so they conceived something both new (since traditional beliefs do not need to be supported by reasons) and extremely important: critical thinking, a basic ingredient of science and philosophy.

Of course peoples all over the world had long been questioning, doubting, arguing and speculating. They had made reasoned choices, and they had given grounds for accepting or rejecting proposals. But around the sixth century B.C. the Greeks, especially those living in settlements on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, began applying this kind of thinking to questions of theology and cosmology.

The father of this kind of critical thinking, and thus to some extent the father of Greek philosophy, was Thales of Miletus, a prosperous town on Anatolia’s Aegean coast. Thales lived in the early sixth century B.C. and reportedly predicted a solar eclipse that modern scholars have dated to 585 B.C. Thales, along with his disciple Anaximander and Anaximander’s student Anaximenes, proposed a radically new way of understanding the world in which the Olympian gods had no place. They did not ask, “Why did an earthquake destroy my house?” but rather, “What causes earthquakes?” And the answer was no longer “Poseidon, because he is angry.”

Thales claimed that earthquakes are caused by the movement of subterranean water. According to Anaximenes, on the other hand, earthquakes occur as a result of both droughts and heavy rains; in droughts the earth dries out and crumbles, and during rains it becomes drenched and falls apart.

Anaximander hypothesized that thunder and lightning result from wind. Whenever wind is enclosed in a thick cloud, it must forcibly escape because of its lightness; thunder is the sound made when wind breaks through the cloud, and lightning is the flash of the momentarily visible wind, which is brighter than the dark cloud.

The fact that none of these ideas is taken seriously today does not matter. What does matter is that they are theories that could be questioned and that the Milesians proposed different theories, probably as a result of critical reflection on the theories of predecessors. Much as Anaximenes thought critically about the ideas of Thales and Anaximander, later scholars refined—or refuted—the ideas of our Milesians. These sixth-century thinkers did not discover the truth but a method of examining and criticizing ideas and theories.

Unfortunately, there is no proof of this interpretation, since their writings have not survived. Our knowledge of their ideas comes from later authors who were more interested in what the Milesians thought than in their reasons for thinking it. However, one thinker of that time was a poet, and enough of his poetry survives for us to see how these early thinkers challenged tradition.

Xenophanes of Colophon, a city about 50 miles north of Miletus, was born about 570 B.C. When Colophon was captured by the Persians in 546 B.C., Xenophanes left and spent the rest of his life (67 years, he tells us) “tossing his thought throughout the land of Greece.” He lived the life of a bard, going from city to city and performing the epics of Homer and other poetry, including his own. It is likely, therefore, that his newfangled ideas were not displeasing to his audience.

One of his most famous fragments attacks the Olympian gods for their immorality, their “thieving, adultery, and deceiving one another.” And he poked fun at human beings for believing the gods looked just like them: “Ethopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and dark, / Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.” His conclusion: “If horses and oxen could draw, / horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses / and oxen to look like oxen.”

Let there be no doubt: Xenophanes and the other early thinkers were not atheists. They believed in divinity, if not in the Olympian gods. Anaximander and Anaximenes believed that the basic substance of the world is divine, and Thales said that “all things are full of gods.”

For Xenophanes, the divine was not a thick-armed Zeus with a thunderbolt: “God is one, greatest among gods and men, / not at all like mortals in body or thought.” Unlike the traditional Greek gods who travel from place to place, Xenophanes’s god “always remains in the same place, not moving at all.” This god is a motionless, sentient, all-powerful being who controls the events of the world not by physical force but by his thought or will.

What are Xenophanes’s grounds for proposing this novel conception of divinity? The answer must be that he, a mere human thinking for himself, determined what god should be like, and so that is how god must be, despite the weight of Greek tradition that described the gods and the causes of events in the world in very different terms.

Critical thinking as practiced by Xenophanes and the Milesian thinkers before him was a powerful tool against the errors of unthinking tradition. It was also a powerful tool for intellectual progress. It attacked some ideas and defended others, and did so by giving reasons rather than by asserting authority. The reasons were stated openly and were themselves subject to criticism. Ideas could now stand or fall on their own merits.

This was indeed a brave new world. Soon the light of critical reason would be cast on just about everything: politics, ethics, epic poetry, drama, love, physics, physiology, the heavens and even the limits of critical thinking itself. As Xenophanes says, “By no means did the gods reveal all things to mortals from the beginning, but in time, by searching, they discover better.” However, he cautions, “No man has seen nor will anyone know / the truth about the gods and all the things I speak of.”

It was a tidy way to explain reality. For the early Greeks, the events of the world were caused by the Olympian gods. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena and the rest looked like humans, but they were more beautiful, they never fell sick or died, and they had better food and drink. They could make things happen—floods, storms, plagues, droughts—and they could prevent things from happening. Since Poseidon causes earthquakes, if an earthquake destroys your house, Poseidon is probably angry with you. Maybe you did something to offend him; for example, after Odysseus blinded Poseidon’s son, the cyclops Polyphemus, the […]