Belief and reason have each been thought to be sources of justification for religious beliefs. Since both can purportedly serve this same function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and scholars how the two are connected. In ancient times, simple dreamlike perceptions of life and death, and practical guidelines and values about right and wrong were passed down through generations by word of mouth. With the presence of villages and the rise in population, and with the settlement of urban communities and the formation of empires, there was an increased need for palaces and temples to set up laws, beliefs, and values.
At the beginning of the Iron Age, while the ethical development of each nation in the Mediterranean region was drawn back by myths, the priests of Israel set out to exploit the newfound power of the alphabet to convince their population to embrace a more refined level of superstition. They developed a detailed mythology, with a single god, a well convincing creation myth, and a revelation of Ten Commandments at around 1250 BC. Using myths about miraculous events, the priests had succeeded in uniting their people under a common belief and giving them a functional arrangement of laws and values. As the years passed, augmentations were made to the scriptures to strengthen the better aspects of religion.

The old Greeks had been passing down amusing stories about heroes and gods. However, numerous Greeks were unconvinced by their traditional religious myths. Greek religions, as opposed Judaism, speculated essentially not on the human world but rather on the whole universe. Both Plato and Aristotle found a standard of the scholarly organization in religious thinking that could work mystically as a halt to the relapse of reason and belief. Plato attempted to restore people’s belief in absolute goodness by writing about a higher domain of reality where a type of equity existed as an eternal standard. Plato understood that without such belief, in a world where moral values could never be proven to be true, it turned into the noblest quest for philosophy to persuade people to think about their community as they do think about themselves.
Christianity among the Roman Empire, Christian thoughts were not new, but rather they were given another voice in the character and life of Jesus Christ, who turned into the mythical embodiment of everything that centuries of moral philosophy had held onto as righteous and holy. The old Arab tribes were solid, but their customary beliefs were primitive and offered little direction. Tribesmen knew no other thing but to battle one another for limited desert resources. As the leader of a band of Arab reformers, Muhammad grabbed a chance to unite the Arab tribes under a convincing understanding of Judaism and Christianity.

At the start of the medieval period, Arab interpreters set to work translating and conveying numerous works of Greek philosophy, making them accessible to Jewish, Islamic, and Christian theologians and scholars alike. Medieval theologians embraced an epistemological qualification the Greeks had created: between scienta, recommendations set up by standards, and opinio, suggestions established by appeals to authority.