Neil deGrasse Tyson in “Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still” (Cosmos) says something to the following effect.
The ancient Greek philosopher Thales argued that natural events such as weather patterns weren't the result of capricious gods intending to reward or punish; rather, they were the result of natural processes that we could understand and thereby predict.
Is this actually accurate?
Assuming that there are no extant works of Thales or Thales of Miletus (c. 620 BCE – c. 546 BCE), numerous sources, starting from his contemporaries accredited him with sicentific discoveries (geometry) and a "naturalistic" approach, based on rejection of godly intervention in the explanation of natural phenomena.
Nothing directly attributed to Thales that has come down to us, but Aristotle does mention four views in his books:
The earth rests on water. (De Caelo)
Water is the archê of all things. (Metaphysics)
The magnet has a soul. (De Anima)
All things are full of gods. (De Anima)
Aristotle inteprets this in several ways:
Archê is Aristotle’s word: it means beginning or source or principle (cf. “archaic,” “archaeology,” “architect”). Aristotle is here talking about what he called the material archê, which can be either the stuff from which something originated or the stuff of which it is composed. Thus, Thales thought (Aristotle tells us) that everything either originated in water (cosmogony) or is actually (now!) made of water (constituent analysis).
The origination in water, seems to be a middle-eastern trope, for example in Genesis, one see that:
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And the flood narrative in the Bible, as well as Gilgamesh, can be interpreted as the world being born anew from the waters.
One might also remark that water takes the shape of the container that it is poured in, so perhaps it might take the shape of a 'man' or a 'stone'. Its also easy to see that water becomes airy (steam) or solid (ice), which again emphasises its metamorphic possibilities; one should think this aligned with the idea in antiquity of the classical elements, which in the minds of some writers represent for the mind of antiquity, what one would now call the four phases of matter.
Magnets, in modern terms do not have 'souls'; but they do act by there own nature. One could say the 'soul' of a stone makes it fall to the ground; that the 'soul' of the sun makes it rise in the east and so on. In modern idiom one might say that all things are full of 'forces'.
Thales, is the philosopher one conventionally points to when one marks the point of separation of logos & mythos in Greek Philosophy. He would not have been the only one, and probably not even the earliest one; but he is the earliest one for which we have testimony of.
As a corroboration of this line of thought is this extract from the (Australian Philosopher) Freya Mathews Paper on Cosmological Panpsychism:
I shall start with cosmological panpsychism under its physical aspect. From this point of view, physical reality as a whole, including both its material and its non-material aspects, such as space and electromagnetic or gravitational energy, forms an unbounded, indivisible, substantival (though not in the first instance material) plenum. This plenum is construed geometrodynamically, as a dynamic extended substance – space – in a continuous process of expansion and internal self-differentiation. The model is the age old one of water (shades of Thales here)(how nice it would be if the very first philosopher got it basically right): the universe may be compared with a vast ocean coursed continually by currents and waves, some of which interfere to become vortices which hold their structure for long enough to give the appearance of independent or enduring existents.
