Almost no one (besides the intellectualized children of modernity, that is) has believed that the world just happened. But the idea that we could understand, using our minds, how it came about, started (so far as we can determine) with the ancient Greeks.

Thales of Miletus took the first recorded step with his, “The first principle of all things is water.” The culmination was Aristotle’s cosmology. There were, fortunately, philosophies that emphasized not grand systems but human living and decision-making: Socrates, the Stoics, the Epicureans.

There wasn’t much agreement on Who the Creator was, even if the educated then believed the world had to have had one, or how He crafted His handiwork.

The Grandest Narrative came together when Jesus of Nazareth, of whom it was said, He is the Messiah — God in the flesh — gathered the following of those who believed they’d seen Him resurrected from the dead, their sins paid for just for the asking and for the promise of trying to be more Christlike.

Finite human beings would never truly grasp this infinite God, outside of three-dimensional space plus time, with their finite intellects designed to work in a world of three-dimensional space plus time. But the incipient West had a source of unity … a worldview with, in philosophical terms, an ontology, an epistemology, a moral philosophy, a diagnosis, and a prescription for living. Life in this world could be harsh, but there was hope for humanity!

Next major stop, 1,200 years later: St. Thomas Aquinas, the pivotal medieval philosopher and theologian who unified Aristotelian cosmology with the Christianity of his time into a single package. This package saw the world not just as fundamentally rational but intelligible to the human mind, because the world had a rational Creator who created human beings in His image. Our minds were finite versions of His Infinite Mind.

At the end of the day, moreover, this world is a moral world, in the sense that morality “gets the last word” because Christendom’s God is the source of all that is morally good and the judge of what is immoral. This gave rise to the ideas of natural law and natural law ethics.

The epistemological side of this package — the intelligibility of the universe — gave rise to modern science in Western Europe, especially England, which had long been applying physical principles to solving all manner of worldly problems: the rise of technology. I do not claim, obviously, that technology had its start with the Western Christian worldview. That would be quite stupid. We’ve always been technological beings at some level, creating systems, interacting with our surroundings to solve problems. But now we could be more conscious of what we were doing and could integrate it into a worldview.

The moral-philosophical side of this worldview developed through philosophers such as John Locke who articulated concepts such as property. Adam Smith gave sense to how transactions function to create and build wealth — as well as the dangers to look out for (dangers sadly forgotten later).

This worldview migrated to the United States which saw its apotheosis, both with the specter of a rising technological civilization and a governing structure which, for the first time, sought to answer to the governed, its divisions designed to limit its capacity to exercise the kinds of arbitrary power to which kings had been prone.

The Bill of Rights, appended to the U.S. Constitution, built in supposed protections for human freedoms. On this foundation we saw steady expansion and a gradual increase in the standard of living for all who participated. Those who led this expansion didn’t always do everything right. Far from it! But the more honest and empathetic among them who still understood, however dimly, the idea that all human beings have intrinsic value if they are God’s creations, made sincere efforts to make things right.

Thus the rise of this Grandest of Narratives! But what happened?

Written without AI!