Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
persistence of these factors for 1,000 years.
That all these factors came together in one great civilization
is quite fortuitous; it didn't happen twice.
I'm sympathetic to part of this thesis. The ancient Ionians were
the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of
Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even
the existence of the world. As Lucretius summarized their views,
'Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all
things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.'
Except for the first week of introductory philosophy courses,
though, the names and notions of the early Ionians are almost
never mentioned in our society. Those who dismiss the gods tend
to be forgotten. We are not anxious to preserve the memory of
such sceptics, much less their ideas. Heroes who try to explain the
world in terms of matter and energy may have arisen many times
in many cultures, only to be obliterated by the priests and
philosophers in charge of the conventional wisdom, as the Ionian
approach was almost wholly lost after the time of Plato and
Aristotle. With many cultures and many experiments of this sort,
it may be that only on rare occasions does the idea take root.
Plants and animals were domesticated and civilization began
only ten or twelve thousand years ago. The Ionian experiment is
2,500 years old. It was almost entirely expunged. We can see steps
towards science in ancient China, India and elsewhere, even
though faltering, incomplete, and bearing less fruit. But suppose
the Ionians had never existed, and Greek science and mathematics
never flourished. Is it possible that never again in the history of
the human species would science have emerged? Or, given many
cultures and many alternative historical skeins, isn't it likely that
the right combination of factors would come into play somewhere
else, sooner or later - in the islands of Indonesia, say, or in the
Caribbean on the outskirts of a Mesoamerican civilization
untouched by Conquistadores, or in Norse colonies on the shores
of the Black Sea?
The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the
difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been
mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and
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