Thomism's ethics Aristotle also proposed explanations (most were wrong, of course, and admittedly he didn't always investigate enough). Not only him, but many others in antiquity (the Epicureans for instance proposed many possible explanations for phenomena). They had a fairly large number of naturalists (in the sense of people who study nature, though many were also philosophical naturalists). I'm unaware that this idea you couldn't understand Nature was widespread, outside Skeptics (and they said that about everything). Admittedly science as we'd call it now wasn't that advanced then, but I don't think an ideological block really existed, or at least was hardly universal.