quaerentes.net

My recent studying into the work of Thomas Aquinas, in particular his commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate has been very helpful in parsing out some thoughts on faith and its realtionship to reason.  Aquinas is very articulate in explaining the various domains of faith and reason.  The first thing is that the two are definitely not at odds with each other.  The key is that human reason is limited.  In partricular all human reasoning begins from sense perception, which as many philosophers have pointed out is unreliable as a conduit of truth.  From those sense perceptions, however, we can understand the nature of thought itself and through this the existence of something other than material things.  I have gone into greater detail about some lines of reasoning concerning the existence of God at some other points in this blog and will not go into greater detail here, but even in this regard the things about God which we can know are very limited and thus the “philosophical God” is one which lacks substance beyond some very basic elements(ie. infinite, good, immutable, first cause, etc).  Aquians simply wonders whether this is all that we can know or all that we need, and suggests that it is not.  However, the things concerning God, salvation, scripture, etc are things which are beyond the unaided power of our reasoning to comprehend.  In some ways this is not a very satisfying answer since it begs the question “why should we choose this particular scripture, etc?”  I think one of the reasons that he would suggest is that although from our own reason alone these things are unattainable, nevertheless they do not contradict that which sound reasoning can know.  That is not to say that it will not contradict some theories of scientists, philosophers, literary critics and the like who would try to pass of their reasoning as certain, but those things which one would have the most reason to consider proven logically would not contradict a sound interpretation of scripture.  There is far more here to discuss but I will continue another time.