Xenophanes

Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher and poet of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, born around 570 BC in Colophon in Ionia and dying around 478 BC after a long life spent largely in exile, traveling and reciting his own poetry across the Greek world. He is best known as an early and sharp critic of the conventional Greek gods as depicted by Homer and Hesiod, arguing that human beings project their own form and failings onto the divine, observing that if oxen or horses could draw, they would draw gods that looked like oxen or horses, and he proposed instead a single greatest god unlike mortals in body or mind. Xenophanes also distinguished between belief and genuine certain knowledge, arguing that no one has ever had, or will ever have, clear knowledge of the gods or the ultimate nature of things, a skeptical strand of his thought that later influenced Pyrrhonism, and he offered naturalistic rather than mythological explanations for phenomena such as fossils and celestial bodies.