ABSTRACT
The mythopoeic conceptions of the ancient Middle East understood the world in personal terms; nature behaved as it did because of the deities that constituted it. Nothing like materialism was possible in a world so pervasively religious. Not until the Greek invention of “natural” processes, which were created by removing divine agency as the explanation of nature’s course, did the earliest version of a materialistic view make its appearance. It should be understood that, when the Greeks removed the gods from their explanations of nature, they created neither a completely impersonal nor even an antireligious view as a replacement. On the contrary, the Greeks assumed that nature’s behavior could be described according to qualities possessed by human beings, particularly Greek human beings. Known for their cultivation of rational analysis, the Greeks assumed that nature, too, was rational. They likewise presumed that another quality important to humans, purpose, was to be found in nature. As a result, the Greek explanation of nature employed rational analysis, epitomized in mathematical description and the identification of nature’s purposeful goals. As long as one’s God was regarded as rational and purposeful, there was nothing about the Greek conception of nature that was inconsistent with religion.
