The ancient belief that virtue was to be located in use of our reason necessitated the investigation of nature. The ancients believed that by studying the nature of things, we could discover the nature of being. While the Biblical worldview said that God had created nature, it didn’t have much to say about nature itself, or whether investigating nature would lead to God. The Bible didn’t even have a word for “nature”; the Hebrew word yetzer is the closest term, and that generally means “will.” But Greek philosophy was different: it suggested that the best way to investigate the nature of human
...more
