As strange as it may seem to us today, there was a time when people would simply accept the answers to the worlds most confounding questions as the work of heroes and the gods. The Greek scholars were not comfortable with this thinking. They were skeptics. Looking back to philosophers such as Plato, they were constantly in question of what they were told, in a pursuit of a greater truth. Thales was at the forefront of this new way of thinking. Many of the ideas from Plato's Allegory of the Cave can be derived from Thales' apprehensiveness to accept "truths"; Thales questioned the definitions of the world that had been passed down to him. He was not willing to accept the image that the fire-keepers had cast upon the wall for him to believe. He believed in the possibility that there might be something different.
It is in this manner that Thales made his greatest contribution to not only astronomy, but also the entire scientific world. By viewing the question "What is the universe made of?" as a challenge humans were capable of taking on rather than something to be explained through folklore, he made a fundamental statement about human knowledge: known or unknown, it is our duty to question, not accept, what is passed down to us. The skepticism he displayed in his thinking gave us a lens into the essence of science, that it is not about facts, but rather the pursuit of the truth about the universe around us.
Another remarkable detail about Thales' attempt to redefine what we know to be the universe is that his answer was about as far off as the supernatural ones that preceded it. This again speaks to the nature of science: it's a process. By presenting his idea to the world, Thales advanced the conversation on this question. Had scientists and astronomers not been imparted with some of Thales' own skepticism, we might still be under the impression that our earth is floating in a universe of water.
Sources: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
http://www.academia.edu/1570908/Good_Science_The_Pursuit_of_Truth_and_the_Evolution_of_Reality
I agree that there is something very important to questioning what's happened before now. Because it pays off to think out of the box and really look at things in new ways. But I wonder if we have become so based on the 'truth of science' that we've fallen back into this mindset. How much do we rely on not only 'higher powers' but also scientist's theories? We often even use logical fallacy to say that something is true because science says it is. Will we find out years from now that we actually structured the universe incorrectly, and have to adapt an entirely new theory on it? This goes back to accepting 'truth' and how even our most proven facts could be wrong.
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