If we (are able to) set aside these obstacles and attempt a fresh view of ancient religion, we see that it was not opposite to philosophical thinking, that, on the contrary, it nourished philosophical thinking. Greek philosophy, as all great Greek achievements, starts with Homer.
We don’t need to be specialized scholars in order to know this, we only need to have the questions above, questions that are natural if one wants to think seriously, and then remember some pretty basic characteristics of the world of Homer, e.g. that men and Gods share the same “nature” in terms of both the environment and the self (Gods are mightier, sometimes ideally beautiful and sometimes immortal, but they are and look like men – they are not monsters, they are not invisible, they don’t live in some unimaginable opposite-to-the-earth ‘place’ -; Gods speak with men, asking and being asked questions; Gods can be doubted and even ignored.
There is in Homer an almost absolute equality of man with god, inside which man starts to think about the meaning of history, the meaning of the whole of existence. The explanation of this meaning is man’s permanent question/prayer to God and it reveals his philosophical nature, out of which comes the later poetry and philosophy.
I won’t go on describing in details this history; perhaps these remarks are enough to let us at least guess that ancient Greek philosophy, or philosophy as such, does not start with science. If we study carefully and without prejudices it will be rather easy to understand that it starts with the philosophical poetry of Homer and continues sometimes as philosophical poetry and sometimes as poetical philosophy.
Cf. Burnet, Development of Greek Philosophy * Heidegger, Through a foundational poetic and noetic experience of Being * The Ancient Greeks (text in Greek only)
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