assumptions that provided few choices.
             Greek philosophy began questioning theism and, indeed, all assumed thought, around the time of Xenophanes in the sixth century B.C. Xenophanes criticized the common idea of multiple Gods who acted like mortals. Instead, he found that an individual God who was all encompassing made more sense in describing the way things were. To this end he expressed an idea of God as everything and everything as God (Frost 103).
             Following Xenophanes, philosophers began to investigate reality and the world in terms of scientific and logical (rather than religious or faith-based) explanation. This was a time of importance in the history of human understanding, as man for the first time began asking about the nature and origin of things based on logic and deduction. Though this was an important step, initial ideas were flawed and based on skewed reasoning. Part of this flawed thinking was due to the necessity of man to place a religious or divine notion on such theories. Protagoras and the Sophists, for example, turned around the traditional idea of man as the product of the universe, as they questioned the existence and plausibility of God Gods. Instead, they argued, man was the center of all things and the study of his relationships was crucial to understanding how things worked (Frost 55, 104). Eliade explains: "religious man, even the most primitive, does not refuse progress in principle; he accepts but at the same time bestows on it a divine origin and dimension" (72). In other words, the Sophists placed a religious divinity on man, since they found flaw with God and yet still needed a religious explanation for how things were. Similar insistence on associating new ideas and logic with new divinity is a notion apparent in almost all stages of philosophic development.
             Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle each had major roles in the further development of reason and thought in philoso...