A-HA!!! (Philosophy)

Before I get started, for those of you interested I have added my Philosophy teachers blog to the links on the right (Subject to Change) If you check it out, look for the post on Comic Books, good stuff there.

Now on to my a-ha moment :) While in class tonight, I had a true a-ha! Philosophy is the religon (sp?) of the athiest. Stick with me here... The ancient Greeks invented the 'myths' as a way to explain the world around them. Their religon provided explainations for why the seasons changed (Persephone), why there was thunder (Zues), for wars, for love, for hate etc etc etc. As human beings, we feel a need to have an explaination for the world around us. For some, religon does not fill that void. It doesn't make sense to some people that things happen because the God's willed it, or a tree is there because God put the tree there. Thusly, in order to compartmentalize the world into understandable sections, Philosophy is born. Take the four causes of Aristotle...While very very general, they offer a convenient way to neatly package the world around us. A tree's material cause is wood (or earth if you prefer), it's formal cause is to reproduce itself (or again to take another view to synthesize carbon dioxide into oxygen for the purpose of providing things with air), its efficient cause is from a seed falling on the ground or someone planting a seed, and it's final cause could be shade or reproduction or providing lumber. Because of the four causes you are able to package the world of why. In my opinion, as humans we need to know why. It almost seems built in. For example my son, who just turned three has hit the why phase (oh please let it be a phase!) For everything I tell him, his reply is why. From what I understand every child does this. So it seems that it is built into us to have a need to understand the world around us, to have compartments that let us seperate information into to help make the world a more understandable place to be in. So in a way, Philosophy can be viewed as an evolution of religon. If I don't like the way religon (the most common form of explaining why) then I can turn to Philosophy to answer my why. This would also explain why my great books professor often used philosophy to explain literature. He said that in the classical world view, God was the reason for everything. When we turned to the modern view, and 'killed' the God figure, we had to find some other way to explain things. A-Ha!!