Natural philosophy, being the precursor to modern day science, was greatly developed in ancient Greece. Like other ancient societies and cultures, the Greeks believed that the world around them was the result of divine intervention (The Ionian Philosophers, 3). Therefore, they based early Greek science around their polytheistic religion in an attempt to answer questions about the world they lived in. However, unlike other religions, their religion wasn't nearly as stringent as others. The Greeks practiced a religion which allowed for free scientific thought. This gave way to the great natural philosophers and scholars. These men, including Thales of Miletus, Aristotle, Democritus, and Pythagoras, among many others, used the scientific method to explain the physical world around them. The use of these sciences was employed in the fields of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and biology in order to improve aspects of Greek life. It also helped to dominate the Mediterranean Sea region, which would be a forerunner to the Roman Empire that borrowed heavily from Greek culture.
The scientific method was used by Greek philosophers in order to hypothesize and theorize about the natural world around them. However, the first research that was done was incoherent and could not be proved. Many philosophers made up information in order to try and prove their theories, but this did not work since there was no proof. It took many years for the scientific method to be perfected and valid. To this day, the scientific method from ancient Greece has had a major impact on scientific thought. The father of this study was a man named Thales of Miletus (Violatti). He was the first person who tried to explain what he saw in the natural world around him (The Ionian Philosophers, 7). Thales formulated knowledge about the physical world around him rather than relying on the supernatural explanations of the world that the Greek mythical religion supplied.