A Short History of Human Thought (Cliff Notes)

Ok, so I may be a little off-center to attempt to boil this down into a blog, but I'll give it a shot. Sometimes the constraint of trying to fit a complex topic into the constraints of a spontaneous, one-take-no-redos kind of format helps to focus the mind. Maybe a little extra diet coke will help :-)

Way back in the dawn of human consciousness when the cave people drew pictures on their walls we lived in the time of mythology. Myths were created and maintained because the stories pointed to a more profound truth that could not be expressed. Also, our ancestors of a few hundred thousand years ago (or longer) had no scientific explanation for anything. So, myths were numerous and served as the science as well as the religion of the day. We have come to discover with fascination how similar many of the myths were across pre-historic cultures.

Out of this foundation of mythology, gradually religions began to be formed. Nowadays we refer to early religions as Earth, Pagan or Mystery Religions. Many rituals were created, observed and passed down through generations. Many of the religions co-opted the appropriate myths that supported their beliefs. Many Mystery Religions contain some of the same creation and messiah stories we inherited in some of the great World Religions.

Eventually, as humans became more logical, a group of ancient thinkers, sometimes called the Ancient Sages, began focusing on the wisdom of living the good life. How to be happy and fulfilled. How to live correctly. This formed the basis of the great Eastern World Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism. A parallel track of development occurred in the Middle East resulting in Judaism.

The golden period of classical Greek thought produced such thinkers as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many more. This sober morality, precise deductive logic and naturalist inductive logic created a body of thought that has formed the basis of Western Thought for the last two millenia.

Christianity was born out of a mixture of Greek philosophy, Judaism, Mystery Religions and the teachings of Jesus. Christianity developed initially along a Neo-Platonic line of thought resulting in a strong metaphysical base and later incorporated the Aristotelian line of thinking with the work of the Medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Christianity also developed a significant list of arbitrary doctrines during the early centuries that were motivated by political power and influence.

We finally reached the level of scientific thinking around the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment period. This followed primarily from Aristotle, was helped along by Francis Bacon, Copernicus and Galileo and came to a head with the work of Isaac Newton and others. Here, we took the logical, naturalistic tendency of Aristotelian thought and developed the scientific method. Science because very inductive and experimental resulting in the industrial age with all its advantages and disadvantages.

The 19th and 20th century saw an incredible creation of new scientific theories that overturned many existing theories in the fields of physics, biology, astronomy and chemistry. Albert Einstein is the poster child for using deductive thought to create grand theories of Relativity, time and gravity that are very non-intuitive, but turn out to be true and have been proved. Charles Darwin used induction to discover the Theory of Evolution.

It seems that as the 21st century dawns, we are entering a time where physics and metaphysics are converging. Many of the current physical theories such as M-Theory cannot yet be proven by experiment and it may not be possible. Much of what we are creating as the Theory of Everything is supported by a deductive system of logic rather than inductive, real-world experiments.

Perhaps we are reaching the End of Science as we have known it for the last 500 years or so and are entering a new era where Science and Metaphysics work hand in hand, moved forward by our increased use of intuition and higher consciousness that transcend traditional ways of knowing. If this is true, we are called upon to use more of ourselves than at any other time in human history.