When people hear the word faith, a sceptic attitude is a common reaction for the secular part of our society, to which I too belong. Something I’ve recently read has however changed my perspective on this quick judgement. The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas has written about this conflict between faith and scientifical reasoning in his book Summa Theologiae. The thing scientists and rational thinkers reject about believers is that they adopt everything the Bible and the pope says as truth, without questioning these statements and investigate for themselves. They do no kind of research but the source of information determines for them whether to immediately believe or not. Philosophy and other scientifical disciplines claim that they’re, because of this more, cogent and rational than theology. According to Aquinas however, this assertion is inconsistent. He states that secular people and all scientifical disciplines believe in a same way as the faith religious people do, considering their careless use of other people’s investigations and theories. They too believe and assume lots of theories without questioning and demanding evidence for everything. This seems quite logical, because how could we investigate everything for ourselves and assume nothing, considering our limited time span of life? How could we have a normal life when we need to investigate and understand éverything before assuming it to be true and get on with the next step? Well, we simply can’t. In this way, faith in the research and theory of a former scientist or philosopher is the same way of thinking as faith in the scriptures of God and the stories told to us by the pope.
Someone could however ask the religious part of our society why they still investigate philosophical matters and bother to worry themselves with these problems, if truth is God-revealed? Why would you bother to think for yourself and do your own research if by revelation you can easily access this truth? Although truth is God revealed, that doesn’t mean all this knowledge and truth is easily accessible. Having true faith requires lots of work; you have to constantly remember yourself that you believe and need to suffice yourself with new arguments why to believe. Those arguments don’t need to be rational or a posteriori, but you obviously need to read the bible to have content in your faith and listen to scriptures of those who went before you.
Also, if you have faith in something, then the entire whole doesn’t yet have to be immediately revealed. When you assume gravity exists and take this into account for your own investigation, you could still check for yourself if this is real. Because it will be true, your faith will live up again and get stronger.
From Knights to computers 