It is a commonplace, says Feser, that the defining characteristics of Western philosophy and science can be found in embryo in the Pre-Socratics. Thales and other Ionian monists give us the first attempts to reduce all the diverse phenomena of nature to a single material principle, and their methods (so far as we can determine on the basis of usually scanty evidence) seem to have been largely empirical. Pythagoras and his followers inaugurate the emphasis on mathematical structure as the key to unlocking nature’s secrets. In Parmenides and Zeno we see the first attempts to provide rigorous demonstrations of far-reaching metaphysical theses. The distinction between appearance and reality, the tension between rationalist and empiricist tendencies of thought, and the rational analysis and critique of received ideas are all evident throughout the Pre-Socratic period.
So as everybody in the discipline, Feser acknowledges the fact that Presocratic philosophers are nothing less than the founding fathers of both Western philosophy and science. The fruits of their efforts were so amazing, he states, that “it might not be too much of a stretch to say that at least the seeds of what was to come [in the philosophical field] during the next two and a half millennia can all be found in their work.”
Where Feser’s article gets very interesting is where he asserts that “What is perhaps less widely remarked upon is the extent to which the Pre-Socratics set the stage for the later development of natural theology.” Indeed, as we saw in a previous blog post, the idea that underlies the whole history of philosophy as taught in our universities today is that Presocratic thought was a turning point in human history that marked the beginning of the end of the domination of religious thought over Western culture. In other words, Presocratic philosophers are considered, by current generations of atheist philosophers, proto-atheists who initiated the great process of Western secularization. The important point raised by Feser concerning the impact of Presocratic thought on religious mentality is of the utmost importance, for he does not deny the devastating impact of nascent philosophy on mythology, but makes it clear that what the Presocratic philosophers were seeking was not "less religion" or "no religion at all", but a better religion:
to be sure, says Feser, that Xenophanes criticized the anthropomorphism of Greek polytheism and that Anaxagoras got into trouble for characterizing the sun as a hot stone rather than a god are widely regarded as great advances in human thought. But the usual reason they are so regarded seems to be because these moves are considered steps along the way to a completely atheistic, or at least non-theistic, account of the world. That Xenophanes wanted to replace polytheism, not with atheism, but with monotheism, and that Anaxagoras regarded Mind as necessary to an explanation of the world, are often considered less significant – as if these ideas were not as essential to their thought as the skeptical elements, and as if these thinkers, and the Pre-Socratics generally, lacked the courage of their convictions, and could not bring themselves completely to let go of superstition.
To make this point clearer, Mr. Feser continues:
what the Pre-Socratic thinkers (or some of them, anyway) saw is that in the light of reason, “folk physics” – our crude, commonsense understanding of the workings of the physical world – ought to give way, not to no physics at all, but rather to scientific physics. Similarly, “folk theology” – the crude anthropomorphisms of polytheism and superstition – ought to give way, not to no theology at all, but rather to rational theology, to what has since come to be known as natural theology.
Then, against the failure to understand theism displayed by the "new atheists", Feser reaffirms the most important truth about natural theology, that is to say, that it leads to a rational knowledge of God that is certainly limited, but reliable:
The classical tradition in natural theology [...] holds that the existence of the God of traditional theism is necessary, and rationally unavoidable, given the existence of any causation at all in the world, even of the most simple sort. And as Gerson [a scholar teaching at the University of Toronto] shows, it is evident from what we know of at least some of the Pre-Socratics that they had more than an inkling of this. That is to say, they saw (or some of them did) that it is theism rather than atheism that is the logical outcome of a rationalist approach to the world.
I am not going to quote the whole article, but I would like to underline, with a final quote from Feser, how the Presocratic philosophers contributed to the development of natural theology. Listing some of the ideas forged by the Presocratics (ideas that Christians would incorporate in their reflection on the mystery of God), Feser writes:
In the work of the Pre-Socratics we find precursors of some of the key elements of the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. In Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron or “unbounded” we have an anticipation of the insight that that which ultimately explains the diverse phenomena of the world cannot itself be characterized in terms that apply to that world (or at least not univocally, as the Thomist would add). From Parmenides we get the principle that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing comes nothing), which foreshadows the Scholastics’ “principle of causality” and the argument to the First Cause that rests on it. We derive from him too the discovery that ultimate reality must be Being Itself rather than a being among other beings, unchanging and unchangeable, and necessarily one rather than many. In Anaxagoras we find the realization that the cause of things must be a Mind rather than an impersonal absolute. It would take the work of later thinkers – Plato to some extent, Aristotle to a great extent, and the Scholastics to a greater extent still, culminating in Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition deriving from him – to work these insights out in a thorough and systematic way. But as with Western science and philosophy more generally, the seeds are there already in the Pre-Socratics; in particular, they made the decisive break with anthropomorphism in thinking about God.
If you want to read Feser’s article, it’s right here.