In the Western world, something happened about 2500 years ago at Athens, Greece. There, people tried to answer the various why questions that we ask with pure reason.
Socrates went about answering those questions from his sophist perspective (there were several schools at Athens, including sophism, stoicism, skepticism, Epicuresm, and atomism). One of his students, Plato, built a school that was called Academy and people came to learn and talk from a rational perspective.
Plato authored many books. One of his students was Aristotle. Whereas Plato was an idealist and attributed things to God’s causation, and talked about architypes, how in heaven all things are perfect but on earth are corrupted, his student, Aristotle looked at the world of the here and now in trying to explain things.
Aristotle established a syllogistic reasoning pattern that posited a major premise, a minor premise and then drew conclusion.
Aristotle accepted the agency of God, of course, but indulged in what we might call empirical analysis. A caused B and B caused C; he traced the chain of causation to an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover that he called God.
For our present purposes, Greeks tried to use pure reason and observation to explain the human condition and their world.
Some Greeks, such as Pythagoras, Ptolemy and Archimedes tried to explain the universe in what seemed to them rational manner; they saw the earth as the center of the universe, this is called the Geocentric view of the universe, as opposed to the Heliocentric view of the universe.
We all must raise our hats for the ancient Greeks; they tried extremely hard to understand things rationally.
The Romans were warriors and conquerors and did not indulge in too much philosophy; they had a world to conquer and rule, nevertheless, they had writers, such as Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Horace and stoic philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Plotinus, Epictetus, and others.
In 475 AD the Roman Empire fell (Germans destroyed it), and the Roman Catholic Church came into being as the ruler of Europe; in 325 AD, Emperor Constantine had made the church the religion of his Roman empire. The Roman Church drove out Greek rationalism and philosophy and replaced it with belief.
It was St Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic theologian who broke people from the church and re-established philosophy again. The masterful historian Eugen Weber provides a brilliant five minutes explanation of how Thomas Aquinas brought us where we are today, away from the rule by the church.
Get this brief yet powerful sweeping and much helpful analysis below…
