Most of this will be surrounding ancient Greece. To answer the big question of why were they so prominent in building civilization, they just wrote things down, that’s really it. And they had people to preserve their writings and translate them so they could be passed down. There probably were more advanced civilizations out here, but they didn’t preserve anything, so nobody cares.
So I got this little theory about where the idea of deities, gods, and higher dimensions came from. It’s a half-joke but I still think there’s truth to it. I don’t think it was consciousness, or existentialism, or morality, the afterlife or anything like that… I think it was just bad weather.
Imagine being the first person to witness a thunderstorm. You might’ve seen rain, but to see the sky roaring at you, flashing lights, and to see that light travel to the ground and set a tree on fire right in front of you, I’d get on my knees and start praying to the sky too.
Now that we understand the weather better, we don’t do all that. But we still recognize it comes from something bigger than us. And on the serious side, a lot of ancient mythological beings are based on natural happenings.
So this is where science and philosophy are 2 sides of the same coin. Science we try to understand how it works. In philosophy, we seek why it works this way.
Science, as we know it today, was launched from the idea of atoms. We still can’t say who finally ‘proved’ it because even now it’s still not that proven, but Galielo is the earliest example of experimenting with them.
But he was in the late-1500s. Almost 2000 years before that, way farther from him than he is from us, Leucippus and Democritus were the first to theorize about atoms.
I’m not getting into the differences between their theories. But overall, they believed that every physical thing in this world was composed of atoms. And all of our senses are based on our interactions with these atoms; including the soul.
Past that, I would say music was the first natural phenomenon where we merged grounded numbers with the abstract sensation of hearing them. You can argue this for any medium, but music is the only art that’s undeniably a science too. Music is numbers. If you pluck an open string on a guitar, it plays a certain note, but if you hold the exact midpoint of that string, it plays that same note an octave higher, which makes that a 2:1 ratio. This extends to all the advanced chords too. There’s a whole branch of physics that quantifies sound.
The Pythagoreans were the group to work with all this. Numbers were their forte. They were the more respected philosophers of this time. Compared to the others who just sat in the house pondering all day, they went outside and tried things
Their name is most familiar with the Pythagorean theorem. This is responsible for most of our engineering, computers, even GPS satellites and robots. So to their credit, these are one of the few philosophers whose work we can tie to real-life accomplishments. We can point to a physical thing and say, “they are the reason this was possible”.
So back to atoms. At the time, it was still just another theory. A few centuries later it was condemned by the Christian Church because they thought it discredited God, like it was the antithesis to creationism. So this started this whole discourse of Atom vs Adam.
I don’t think they should’ve taken that to heart because religion is the human experience and science is the universe’s language, those are 2 different things. The Greeks touched on space and cosmology, but just like us, they couldn’t find an answer. Eventually this amplified with the separation of church and state that we have today
And that’s about it for now. I only get so much time on these. I’m gonna make a separate science post soon. I definitely want to explore more of this down the line.
Grant Abraham 