Long before laboratories, telescopes, or peer-reviewed journals, human beings were already doing something extraordinary: asking why. Why does the sun rise? Where do we come from? What happens when we die? The answers they reached – through myth, through philosophical reasoning, and eventually through scientific inquiry – were not three separate projects. They were three chapters of the same story. Understanding how myth, philosophy, and science share a common origin doesn’t just tell us about the past; it tells us something fundamental about how the human mind works and what it has always been reaching for.

Myth as the first form of knowledge
Myth as early cosmology
From mythos to logos: the birth of philosophy
Thales and the search for a single principle
Anaximander and the boundless
Plato, Aristotle, and the enduring shadow of myth
Science grows from the same root
The questions that persist
A single human impulse, three expressions

Myth as the first form of knowledge

It is tempting to look at ancient myths as primitive or naive, but that reading is deeply unfair to what myth actually was. According to the World History Encyclopedia, myths were not simply entertainment – they served the same purpose for ancient peoples that accepted scripture does for many people today: they explained the world, offered comfort, and gave a sense of unity and shared identity to entire communities. For the people who told and retold them, they were not fiction. As scholars note, ancient peoples would have regarded their myths as sacred, divine revelations that explained the origin of the world and humanity’s place within it.

Consider the breadth of this: the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish described the creation of the universe through a clash of primordial forces; the Egyptians envisioned a sun god navigating a celestial barque to ensure the dawn; Greek cosmogony began with Chaos, from which arose the Earth, the Abyss, and Love. These are not random stories. Cosmogonic myths shaped entire cultures’ beliefs, framing their understanding of nature and existence and providing the moral and social scaffolding on which civilizations were built.

Wikipedia’s overview of myth, drawing on religious scholarship, captures it well: in a religious context, myths function as carriers of the most fundamental truths a society holds – truths by which people regulate and give meaning to their lives. Scholar Joseph Campbell, in his influential work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, further argued that mythology is the underlying form of every civilization and the foundation of each individual’s consciousness, pointing to recurring themes across cultures that reflect universal human experiences.

Myth as early cosmology

What is especially significant is that myths were doing cosmological work – the same work that science would later take up with different tools. Myths functioned as an early form of scientific inquiry, exploring the causes of natural events: geological phenomena were explained through mythological tales, seasonal changes were attributed to figures like Persephone, and astronomical events were framed as battles between divine beings. The questions being asked – about origins, order, chaos, life, and death – are exactly the questions that cosmology, metaphysics, and physics would later inherit.

From mythos to logos: the birth of philosophy

The decisive shift happened in the 6th century BCE, in the Greek city-states of Ionia on the coast of present-day Turkey. Here, for the first time in the Western tradition, thinkers began to ask the same ancient questions – what is the world made of? what governs natural events? – but reached for answers through reason rather than narrative. This movement from mythos (myth) to logos (reason) is one of the most consequential intellectual transitions in human history.

Crucially, it was not a clean break. As historian Fabrizio Musacchio explains, the shift from mythos to logos was not a wholesale rejection of myth but a reorientation toward a different explanatory framework – one that privileged natural causality and coherence. D.C. Lindberg, a historian of science, makes the same point: this was not the replacement of mythology by philosophy, since Greek mythology continued to flourish for centuries. Rather, it was the appearance of new philosophical modes of thought alongside – and sometimes intertwined with – mythology.

Thales and the search for a single principle

Thales of Miletus, whom Aristotle regarded as the first philosopher, proposed that water was the fundamental substance underlying all of reality. By modern scientific standards this is wrong, but its significance lies not in its accuracy but in its method. Aristotle recognized this: what made Thales the first philosopher was not that he offered a cosmogony, but that he provided a naturalistic explanation of the cosmos supported by reasons – not by divine will. By positing a single material principle underlying natural phenomena, Thales replaced supernatural explanations with natural ones, implicitly assuming that the cosmos operates according to consistent and comprehensible laws – a foundational assumption of all scientific reasoning.

Anaximander and the boundless

Thales’ student Anaximander went further. Rather than identifying water or any other familiar element as the ultimate substance, he proposed the concept of the apeiron – the boundless or indefinite – as the source from which all things originate and to which they return. Anaximander also offered what is called the principle of sufficient reason – a revolutionary argument that nothing comes from nothing – and made early contributions to geography and biology, positing theories about the evolution of life and the structure of the Earth. His ideas foreshadowed evolutionary thinking by over two millennia.

The pre-Socratic intellectual revolution is widely considered the first major step toward liberating human thought from purely mythical frameworks, initiating the march toward rationalism and scientific methodology that would shape Western philosophy and science for centuries.

Plato, Aristotle, and the enduring shadow of myth

Even as philosophy became increasingly systematic, it never fully abandoned myth. Pre-Socratic philosophers used myth as a point of departure, engaging with mythological concepts while seeking to surpass them through rational thought. Plato is the most striking example: in the Republic, he critiques certain myths for their moral inadequacy, yet he also composed his own philosophical myths – including the famous allegory of the cave – to convey truths that he felt pure argument could not fully capture. For Plato, myth and reason were not enemies; they operated at different registers of insight.

Aristotle, meanwhile, acknowledged in his Poetics that myth in tragedy can evoke catharsis and convey genuine truths about human experience and emotion. A ScienceDirect study on the evolution of medical thought from antiquity draws a compelling parallel: despite the differences among philosophical schools, they shared a common orientation – a persistent search for universal truth and rationality – and it was through this philosophical lens that figures like Hippocrates first separated medicine from theocratic doctrine and made it rational, giving rise to science in the medical domain.

Science grows from the same root

Modern science did not appear from nowhere. It grew directly from the philosophical tradition that grew from myth. Andrew Gregory, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, argues that Greek thinkers produced the first recognizable science against a background of myth, magic, and mysticism – meaning that science was not the negation of that background but a development from within it.

The Copernican Revolution in the 16th century, which introduced a heliocentric model of the solar system, challenged Aristotelian cosmology – itself a product of philosophical refinement of earlier mythic models. Newton’s discovery that the same laws govern a falling apple and an orbiting planet shattered the old division between terrestrial and celestial realms – another idea with deep roots in the philosophical tradition. The development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment gave humans a rigorous tool for testing hypotheses, but the questions driving that method were as old as the first myths.

The questions that persist

What is telling is that the deepest questions science now pursues are the same ones myth originally posed. As one historical analysis puts it, myth and science represent different approaches to a single objective: an understanding of the world around us. Today’s physicists searching for a unified theory of everything are, in a meaningful sense, doing what Thales did – looking for the one principle underlying all of reality. The Big Bang theory gives us a rigorous account of the universe’s origin, but as cosmological research acknowledges, questions about what preceded the Big Bang, or why anything exists at all, remain open – and push us back toward philosophy and, ultimately, toward the kind of fundamental wonder that first gave rise to myth.

One important philosophical perspective argues that mythic thought cannot simply be replaced by philosophy or science – not because myth is more primitive, but because it addresses dimensions of existence that reason alone cannot reach: historical particulars, moral grounding, and the lived sense of meaning. Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, attributed much of modern humanity’s anxiety precisely to its rejection of myth and the sacred, suggesting that the dismissal of mythological thinking may have costs we have not fully reckoned with.

A single human impulse, three expressions

The unity of myth, philosophy, and science is not merely historical curiosity. It reveals something about what it means to be human. Every civilization, in every corner of the world, looked at the sky and felt compelled to explain it. Creation stories across cultures share a common structure: they provide humans with a sense of meaning, purpose, and place in the cosmos. Philosophy sharpened that impulse into argument. Science equipped it with method. But none of these traditions invented the impulse itself – they inherited it.

This means that science, for all its power and precision, stands on the shoulders not just of philosophers but of storytellers. The myths that explained thunder as the anger of Zeus, or the seasons as the grief of a goddess, were the first systematic attempts to answer the question that still drives particle physicists and cosmologists today: why is the world the way it is? The tools have changed almost beyond recognition. The question has not.

What do you think? If myth, philosophy, and science all emerge from the same deep human need to understand existence, does that mean our scientific theories today are simply the myths of our era – the best stories we can currently tell? And if the most fundamental questions about the cosmos still resist scientific answers, what does that suggest about the limits of any single mode of inquiry?

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Table of Contents

Myth as the first form of knowledge 🔗

Myth as early cosmology 🔗

From mythos to logos: the birth of philosophy 🔗

Thales and the search for a single principle 🔗

Anaximander and the boundless 🔗

Plato, Aristotle, and the enduring shadow of myth 🔗

Science grows from the same root 🔗

The questions that persist 🔗

A single human impulse, three expressions 🔗