There has been some historical intellectual consideration of the root source of all things and the possibility of some intelligent creator throughout the course of all humanity, but to connect with any type of unbiased serious intellectual consideration, one has to find a time prior to the corrupting influence of all the politically inspired religions hat have been created along the way. To reach this point of intellectual consideration, one has to look way back to a time when all this hype and hyperbole were not so extreme. In Western thinking, most of this clear consideration goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks, but a few things such as panpsychism actually preceded even that.
Thales of Miletus in the tradition of panpsychism was one of the first to explain the vast diversity in nature as deriving from a single ultimate substance instead of the more traditional use of imagination driven mythological devices. Later, Anaxagoras presented the concept of a universal mind in which he proposed the power of this mind in organisms that enables them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. Anaxagoras’ concept of mind (nous) and awareness (gnó̱si̱) were believed to be more widely distributed than just humans. He felt that all living things exhibited these characteristics in their interactions with their surroundings, and he further speculated this primal substance of consciousness existed in both animate and inanimate things.
During the first and second century CE, a variety of ancient religious and philosophical ideas began to be fused together under the modern name of gnosticism. Gnosticism is the conflation of ideas from various Greek philosophers steeped in the belief of panpsychism and the emerging teachings of Jesus. The fundamental tenet of all these various flavors of gnosticism is that a person in this material world exists as a divine spark trapped in the human body that can only be liberated by gnosis (aka spiritual knowledge) acquired through direct experience. In gnosticism, one achieves salvation by acquiring correct gnosis (knowledge).
Later, the Christian religion evolution took a radical departure from its original gnostic approach after the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity. The influence of Constantine refocused the religion away from spiritual revelation of knowledge to something much more politically expedient for him. In this more political approach, follower were aggressively ‘marketed’ into a religion where the faithful were forced to believe what they were told. This new dogma shifted from the individual focus on peace, love, and knowledge to something more conducive to the accumulation of power, control, and wealth by the church and its administrators.
The point where this power shifting dogma occurred is where everything suddenly gets way more complicated. Up until this point, everyone was free to consider the topic of a conscious creator without worrying about infringement on someone’s intellectual property rights to the Divine. Before this Christian self-proclamation as the only access point to knowledge about the conscious creator, no one owned sole source access to the creator being. Needless to say, consideration of the topic got weird at this point, and these notions about a creator took a turn for the worse.
The intellectual openness of the Enlightenment undermined the oppressive authority of monarchies and the Christian church and paved the way for the political and religious revolutions to come. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, and constitutional government wherein the church and state are separated.
Also during this Enlightenment, a new religious philosophical position of Deism emerged that rejected this Christian revelation as a source of all religious knowledge and asserted that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to establish the existence of a conscious creator of the Universe. In something of a return to the original Christian gnosticism, Deists believed answering the question about the existence of a conscious creator can be based on reason and ordinary experience of nature which they in turn called natural theology.
Deist philosophers were not the only ones to reject the Christian revelation as a source of knowledge and to appeal only to the truths that could be established by reason alone. Beyond deism, many others became so disenchanted with this oppressive Christian revelation rhetoric that they became full fledged intellectual deniers. They resist any possibility that such a creator might exist even in the face of certain things that defied their materialistic view of reality such as their very own mysterious consciousness.
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