How Zoroaster Set the Stage for Socrates and the Scientific Revolution

The historical battle between truth and tradition

Millennia ago, the Persian prophet Zoroaster made the revolutionary claim that men had the right to think for themselves and criticize their traditions. Generations after him, the Greek philosopher Socrates developed a dialectical method for his students to properly do these exact same two things. And, a millennia and half after that, the European philosophers of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment broke from Roman…