The transition from myth to logos, which occurred in Miletus in the sixth century before Christ, was not a rejection of religion. It was a change in the type of response that Greek thinkers began to demand to explain the world: from an inherited narrative to an examinable argument.
What was myth, and why wasn't it foolish?
Every culture, before Miletus, already explained the world, and explained it well. The answers came in the form of mŷthos (μῦθος), the narrative told and inherited from generation to generation. Why does the sea exist? Because a god created it. Why the thunder? Because a god was angry. Myth is a legitimate and profound way of making sense of the world, not a gross error that reason needed to correct. It's important to keep this in mind, because the story is often told as if the myth was ignorance and the logos was the cure, and that's not quite the case.
What actually changed
What changes in Miletus is the type of response that is required. Those men no longer asked "what story explains rain?", but rather "what natural cause produces it, a cause that I can defend with an argument, and not with the authority of a god?". The Greek word for this other form of response is lógos (λόγος): reason, explanation, the speech that gives an account of itself before anyone who wants to examine it. It's not a change of subject, it's a change of criteria: what counts as a good answer.
The detail that almost everyone gets wrong
And here's a caution, because this passage is usually told as a divorce between reason and faith, and it wasn't. Thales, the first of these men, still said: "All things are full of gods" (apud Aristotle, On the Soul, I, 5, 411a7). In other words: the divine was not expelled from the world, it was dissolved within it. It stopped being a personal god who decides on a whim and became an order, a law that permeates things. It is not atheism, it is a change of place from the sacred, from individual whim to the universal order. This displacement, more than any specific answer about water or air, is what actually separates the world before Miletus from the world after it.
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What does the transition from myth to logos mean?
The change in the type of answer that the philosophers of Miletus began to demand to explain the world: instead of an inherited narrative about the will of a god (myth), a natural cause, defensible by argument and examinable by anyone (logos).
Did Greek philosophy reject the gods by exchanging myth for logos?
No. Thales, the first philosopher, still said that "all things are full of gods". The divine was not expelled from the world, it was dissolved within it: it stopped being a personal and capricious god and became an order, a law that permeates things.
What is the difference between myth and logos?
Mŷthos (μῦθος) is the told and inherited narrative, a legitimate way of making sense of the world. Lógos (λόγος) is reason, the explanation that gives an account of itself, defensible by argument and open to anyone's examination.
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Source class (NousCast Community): Quem foram os Pré-Socráticos? O momento em que o mundo deixou de ser explicado por deuses