For thousands of years mankind has been looking for explanations to understand the world we live in. Before philosophy got established and long before todays worldview evolved from it, myths provided explanations for the phenomena that we experience on this planet. Some of these myths have survived until today, and as early as 700 bc the process of writing them down began. Many myths share the involvement of supernatural beings, who impact and even shape the world with their actions. They are responsible for storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and also ordinary things like rain and sunshine. These Gods and Half-Gods rarely appear alone, they maintain relationships and sometimes get into conflict. Just like ordinary humans do. Often they are also specialize, have specific responsibilities for certain elements or groups of people. Mankind lives in the world that is created by those supernatural beings. It is worth pointing out that in this worldview, behind everything that happens a living being is seen as the cause of it. Nothing exists or changes without someone acting in the background. That is how our ancestors looked at the world.
In the documented myths the gods often show a very humanlike behavior. They have desires, they are jealous and envious, angry and sad. Out of these emotions they cause the natural forces and events. The first known philosophers around 500 bc in Greece questioned this projection of human peculiarity onto the Gods, and looked for answers based on the world that is perceptible to human sensory organs. They wanted an explanation of the natural phenomena that is free of any supernatural beings, and instead refers to the observable elements within nature itself. Natural philosophy was born, and we can consider it the precursor of modern science.
Heraklit recognizes that all contrasts have a necessary purpose in the wholeness of the world. Only the continuous struggle of these contrasts keeps the world moving. Without them, the world would solidify into a standstill. All contrasts are part of a unity, which enables the change in the world. This thought has remained and we also find it in modern physics. It is the contrast of two counteracting forces that keeps the planets moving in their orbit. The contrast of two opposing poles that makes the current flow through the wires and the electrical machines. Contrasts let the ocean currents flow and the winds blow. The contrast of the hot sun and the cold space keeps all movement and all life on earth going.
Empedokles postulates four elements that everything in the world is made of: water, earth, fire and air. In addition he assumes a connecting and separating force, which can combine the elements to all the things we see and also dissolve them again into water, earth, fire and air. This idea we also still use today in physics, when we try to explain the world with matter and forces. Still today we have a modular system of particles, which used to be atoms, then protons, neutrons and electrons, and now even smaller ones. And we have a number of attracting and repelling forces. The idea of atoms was also presented by a Greek philosopher called Anaxagoras. He said the world is made of small particles, too small to see with the naked eye, and that they are arranged by a force that he calls spirit.
The concept of spirit is rarely used in modern physics. There we prefer to simply talk about forces. The forces we assume to be connected with matter, we could say that we consider them to be a product of the particles. The living beings, who are omnipresent in the myths and who still play a role for Anaxagoras, have been abandoned by modern science. In consequence, science, and physics in particular, has specialized in the explanation of the inanimate nature. It is now the task of biology and humanities to investigate the living creatures. This way, science has given up on the idea of a holistic observation of the world and splintered into many specialized fields. Each of them looks for explanations within their area based on ideas that are suitable. Ever since there are attempts of individual scientists to recover the lost unity of science. It is the quest for an idea that unifies the living and the inanimate. An idea that includes both the oxidation of the nail in the beam and the growth of the tree.
In search for this idea some questions are commonly raised. One of them is how life was created. The assumption usually is, that matter has somehow taken a form that produces or happens to be a living creature, and thus life was born. Much effort then is directed towards finding an explanation how this happened. We could also ask if there was matter before there was life. We usually assume that nothing can exist without matter, because everything is connected to it and caused by it. But is that really true? How did we end up with that idea? Anaxagoras idea, which explains the formation of atoms with a force called spirit, is still valid today. We cannot explain a living organism with the characteristics of the smallest particles alone. We do not understand or control the forces that create our own body. We can only watch and be amazed how it emerges, grows, then ages and finally returns to durst. The forces that are active here go beyond what we can build today with our technology. We are on our way to understand the building blocks that nature uses to form living organisms. We also build with them, but in a different way. We cannot yet be creative like nature is. If we want to understand how nature does this, it is not unreasonable to consider once again the idea of a spirit, a living being behind the forces of nature. Despite putting so much effort into leaving that idea behind in the past centuries, the time for it has come again.