“Why do the stars not fall down at our feet?” Our ancestors asked themselves this very question. The average person living in sixthcentury B.C. speculated that invisible powers held the stars up in the night sky, with one supernatural power and god for each and every star. They believed it was the anger of these gods that caused diseases and natural catastrophes on Earth. But not everyone thought this way.
During this time, there was an impressive intellectual awakening on the Greek island of Samos. It was first proposed that the earth revolves around the sun, and that animals and human beings evolved from simpler forms. It was where thinkers realized that everything was made out of smaller particles, diseases have a biological cause, there is order to nature, and the secrets of the universe are discoverable. However, these crucial insights sat dormant for many centuries, waiting to be rediscovered by Copernicus, proven by Charles Darwin, and investigated by other legendary scientists. Why?
The answer lies in one simple fact: mysticism and irrationality once held more importance than science and rationality. Thales was the first man who attempted to explain the existence of land within water without any intervention of the supernatural. His student, Anaximander, used a stick and its shadow to measure time, the length of the year, and the seasons. Yet Democritus argued for the existence of atoms, as many other proceeding thinkers were prosecuted for their thoughts. Other intellectual inhabitants of the Greek islands favoured the magical worldview, founded by Pythagoras. Though he was perhaps the first individual to propose that the earth was a sphere and revolutionized the mathematics of his time, Pythagoras believed that order in nature could only be explained through supernatural causes. He and his followers favoured belief over experiments and suppressed their findings. They later reasoned that the laws of nature would never be understood except through mystics, a contradiction to their earlier viewpoint. This way of thinking later dominated Western philosophy.
It is thought that mysticism overthrew science because, as Carl Sagan explains, “Mystical explanations provided intellectually respectable justifications for a corrupt social order.” Spirituality supported the idea of slavery, and Greek society had a large population of slaves during Plato and Aristotle’s time. They believed science should be kept for a small population of elite, and not the public. Mysticism dominated Western thought for more than twenty centuries. It is only recently that we have rediscovered the mindset of the first Greek scientists.
