Discovery that the World is Rational

Abstract

The great mutation in the cultural genes of humanity occurred during the 7th and 6th centuries BCE in the Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor: a few audacious thinkers sought to comprehend the world with the help of their own mental capacities without any recourse tomyths and legends. The beginnings of critical thinking inevitably influenced religious beliefs. In modern language we could say that the laicization of mythical religions was inevitable. Although the immediate crisis struck only rather narrow religious elites, its effects in the long range were enormous. This process could be regarded as a first ever conflict between religion and science or, more strictly, between mythical religion and the beginnings of critical thinking. It was accompanied by another one, also pregnant with important consequences. In some philosophical systems there appeared a god or a deity. Such a god or deity was not an object of worship, but was considered rather as a sort of “ideal closure” of a given philosophical system. Such was Plato’s demiurge and Aristotle’s First Cause or First Mover.