This is quite interesting, about Strunk and the term, "methodological
atheism." I wonder whether that is actually its first use.
As for the ancients and MN, I borrow the paragraph below from the article
on "scientific naturalism" that I wrote with my friend, philosopher Robin
Collins. (We try to give a short history, then a short philosophical
commentary.)
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The first naturalists in the Western tradition were certain Presocratic
philosophers, who sought to explain all things as natural events, rather
than as the result of divine actions. For example, Thales of Miletus (fl.
ca. 585 B.C.) attributed earthquakes to tremors in the water on which the
disk of the earth floated -- a naturalistic rendering of the older Greek
view that the god of the sea, Poseidon, was responsible for causing them.
Similarly, the author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease
(i.e., epilepsy), written about 400 B.C., opens the work by rebuking those
who would attribute the cause of the disease to the gods: in his opinion,
they are simply hiding their own ignorance of the real cause, like "quacks
and charlatans."
*****************
Scholars used to refer to the "birth" of this type of naturalistic
reasoning as "the Greek miracle," and indeed it was the only kind of miracle
those scholars accepted.
Ted Davis
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