Today we are the proud owners of space dust and a mission to Pluto. Both are amazing stories.

Today's New York Times tells us that last Sunday, the Stardust mission came to its end after seven years, landing on the salt flats of Utah. The 100-pound sample container captured perhaps a million particles which originated at the edge of the solar system or from distant stars. The spacecraft flew with a 14-inch-wide collector resembling a tennis racket. It gathered remains of materials which formed the planets and other bodies some 4.6 billion years ago.

Meanwhile, yesterday NASA launched its first space mission to Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft has embarked on a nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to the edge of our solar system.

Why do we have such an incessant curiosity about the world we inhabit? It's part of human nature to want to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. We have been on this quest since the beginning of our history. Millennia before we could travel into space physically, we were exploring our world intellectually. And the conclusions we reached still affect the way we see ourselves today.

Last Friday we began our very brief survey of Western culture (http://www.godissues.org/articles/articles/601/1/Why-do-we-think-the-way-we-think%3F), trying to understand why we think the way we do. Why does our society believe that there are no objective ethics or absolute truths? Why do we separate the "spiritual" from the "secular," Sunday from Monday? Why do we believe that non-contradiction is the test for truth? Why do we measure success in material terms? A single airplane ride will take you to cultures which accept none of the above statements. If we don't know why the culture influences our lives, we become its unwitting prisoners.

We began at the beginning, with the first "philosophers" in Western history and their emphasis upon the material, interest in rationality, and separation of "soul" and "body." They are the "pre-Socratics," for the obvious reason that they came before Socrates. This week we'll meet the man who makes them "pre," the most important secular thinker in Western history. He never wrote a book. There is no building, painting, or song we can attribute to him. But he changed forever the course of our history and culture. He influences the way you will think and live today. Why?