Time Immortal

Let’s get the small stuff out of the way first.

I talk about religion and atheism because I want to do so, because it pleases me to do so. I’m a human being, and I live in a society, and talking about things is a very human thing to do.

Granted. It’s interesting to hear the reasoning you have behind your talking about things you emphatically don’t believe in, though.

Religion has philosophical implications, especially in epistemology, and I am an intellectual who writes about philosophy and epistemology. The philosophical dimension provides additional motivation.

Reasonable. Of course, that doesn’t explain what you are attempting to accomplish here, but perhaps that will become clear in a moment. (As should now be evident, I am reading this paragraph by paragraph, and responding as I go).

Religion also has substantial political implications. Take “God” off my front porch on Sunday morning, off the money, out of the pledge, out of the classroom and out of the political process and I would find it a much less interesting and compelling topic.

Firstly, it isn’t ‘your’ money, inasmuch as you are not the person who established the financial system of the nation, nor are you the person who prints the money. Secondly, if God wants to be on your front porch on Sunday morning, that’s His prerogative — if, by saying that, you mean that you don’t want anyone to come to your door and preach, then make use of your front lawn (assuming that you live in a house and not an apartment) and put up a sign saying “If you believe in God, go away!” It is your property, and you can exert at least that level of control over who does and does not cross on to it.

Of course, if you instead mean that you would rather all us believers have our houses of worship closed down, well, that’s a different matter which I may touch on presently if I feel so inclined.

As for the pledge and the classroom, I’m not going to delve too deeply into that, because it’s an American political matter. And while I have some passing interest in American elections, I really don’t think there’s much for me to say about such issues.

Although I do have to note one thing: over 90% of Americans believe in God, to some extent or another. What right, then, does a very small minority have to impose its own god-free beliefs on that large majority, especially since we have not conclusively settled the issue of whether God exists or not (and especially since the logical foundation for the argument that He does not exist is much more tenuous)?

You personally might not have any political dimensions to your faith, but millions of others in this country do, and it is but a small step from “there are other ways of knowing” to “teach these ways in school” and “employ these ways in constructing our laws.”

Do Christians — and all the faithful — not have a right to involve themselves in the way in which the laws of their nation are constructed? Again, 90% or more of Americans still believe in God. That’s over 250,000,000 people. One would think, in a just society, that at least a few of their (religiously-motivated) moral concerns would be reflected in the laws of the nation, and that at least a few passing glimpses of that groundswell of faith would be reflected in other aspects of the nation’s governance.

Personally, though, I think you’re fighting the wrong battle. Christianity, within its own tenets, establishes with reasonable clarity that some matters are the concern of the state, and others the concern of the Lord. That’s not to say that Christians don’t have an interest in politics — certainly I do, and I’m not going to vote for a candidate whose personal ideals, or whose party ideals, go against the teachings of the Catholic Church in any particularly egregious way. And millions of Christians, as you point out, think along similar lines.

But far fewer Christians seek to actively impose that faith onto society as a whole. They simply don’t want to see their faith made illegal, nor do they want to see society embrace a raft of sweeping socio-ethical changes in favour of things that are immoral. And they have a right to demand that, as surely as you have any right to demand the opposite. And, furthermore, they have a right to ask that “In God We Trust” stick around as much as you have a right to demand that it be thrown out with the trash.

The difference, of course, is that there’s a lot more of them than you. And in the society you choose to live in, that counts for something. You say you want all these things to be different — God “off your porch” on Sundays, and off your money, and out of your schools (does that still happen? I thought the ACLU had taken care of that). Okay, fine…you want all those things. Why should the larger majority of the population of the country in which you live kowtow to those demands, when their own viewpoint is a) opposite and b) in the majority?

Or, to put it another way, what right do you have to impose an absence of God on the public eye, when the majority of the public eye believes in God to some degree? If America really is a nation that is the sum of all its parts, then the presence — however miniscule, and it is quite miniscule already — of God in some aspects of its governance is a given. If you want God-free governance, move to a nation that has either a higher proportion of atheists in its public body, or move to a nation that has officially adopted atheism as government policy (although it serves to note that such nations as are to be found in that latter category are often not the sort that could be described as affording their populations a great deal of personal freedom).

In the end, what change you or I can effect in our respective societies within our lifetimes is minimal; we are here but a while, and then are gone. Our lasting legacy will be the lives we leave behind — both the hearts and minds we win for our respective philosophical standpoints and the lives we, with our respective wives, give rise to. In other words, what will ultimately win this great debate is the faith, or lack of faith, in our children.

How many kids do you have, or plan to have? My wife and I plan to have at least four…and many other believers still believe in large families as well. Keep that in mind: if you have fewer kids than me, my sons/daughters and I will, ultimately, bury you. And the faith that I pass on to my children will bury the lack of faith you pass on to yours.

I find professional sports equally incomprehensible and ridiculous, but since I don’t have to pledge allegiance to the 49ers, nor does the coach have any sort of privileged position in our social moral discourse, nor do Mets fans crash airplanes into Yankee stadium, I don’t spend a lot of time criticizing the activity.

I don’t find all sports incomprehensible, and some of them I quite enjoy. As an atheist and a scientist, you should be more able than I am to appreciate the utility of sport in society, given that the ‘brutal Darwinian history’ of all nature is, in essence, a story of competition and struggle for superiority. That attitude is directly reflected in competitive sport.

Boxing, though, I just have to wonder at. It’s two men standing there punching each other with big, padded gloves. Maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t see the appeal.

If the religious wish to construct their faith at the same social and philosophical level as professional sports, they have my unqualified support.

Well, I can’t speak for most religious, but as for myself I tend to view it as being a higher ideal than base competitiveness. I’m not going to jump in to the political arena and demand that the Catechism of the Catholic Church become the new legal code of Canada, but by the same token I’m not going to vote for a candidate that, for example, is actively pro-abortion, or pro-euthanasia, or…well, you get the point.

I syndicate the Freethunk comic; a new comic appears every week. I don’t choose the specific content. Of course, I still maintain editorial responsibility. Regardless of the source of the content, the charge of “bigotry” is risible and hyperbolic.

So is the suggestion that a nation — a nation with more than 250,000,000 people who express some manner of belief in God — delete all references to God from the public eye. But that doesn’t seem to slow people down when they want to suggest that it happen.

Keep in mind that it is you, not me, who is throwing around charges of intolerance and bigotry as if they were great ethical failings.

The fact that “tolerance” is self-referentially incoherent for the reason you mention (how does one tolerate intolerance?) compels the conclusion that tolerance is, at best, a relative virtue. However it can be simply abandoned: One can simply declare tolerance itself is not per se a virtue; it is simply that which happens when one does not specifically condemn something.

I advocate tolerance of such categories as race, gender and sexual orientation not because I believe tolerance is a virtue per se, but because I think we ought to tolerate diversity in these categories. The ethical belief attaches to the categories, not to “tolerance”.

That’s a fair proposition, but it also doesn’t address the question posed. Race, gender, and sexual orientation are all fine categories to claim one expresses tolerance toward, and the Constitution (if I remember correctly) includes all those and religion as well. You omit from your list, either by accident or on purpose, religion. Which is the case, I wonder?

Am I to assume that your omission of religion as a category of your tolerance was mere oversight, and that you believe in showing tolerance toward the faithful and their beliefs? Or should I instead assume that you explicitly meant to omit religion as a category of your tolerance, and that you believe it’s fine to demonstrate a modicum of intolerance toward the faithful and their beliefs?

All I ask for here is a bit of clarity. I could jump to a conclusion, if you’d prefer, but I feel like giving you one additional opportunity to explain your exact position on this issue.

So let’s talk about epistemology: What do we know? How do we know it? What does it mean to say we “know” something?

Always a deep question. There are additional layers of questioning which we might add to the listing above, but for now it will do nicely.

Let’s first dispose of metaphysical positivism, the idea that we can know something (epistemic positivism), or attach specific meaning to a word (semantic positivism) only on the basis of direct perception or analytic definition. The self-referential incoherence of this sort of metaphysical positivism was decisively established in the early 20th century by, among many others, Quine and Popper. Although positivism retains some descriptive and normative power in scientific (naturalistic) epistemology (evidence should be positivistically established), it is no longer enshrined as a fundamental metaphysical principle.

On this, I have relatively little to say, because, by and large, I agree. Dispensing with the ‘big words’, so to speak, this basically reduces to what I said before about a lack of evidence not being the same as a disproof. Of course, given your attempt to refute Mr. Jonas with the example of the elephant behind the couch, this also seems to be a curious reversal of opinion on your part…but perhaps this apparent confusion will clear up as I read further.

You can read more about my ideas about the scientific method by clicking on the “Scientific Method” label on my blog. (I’ll omit the link so that this message does not run afoul of your spam filter.) Popper still remains the canonical expert on scientific epistemology, although more work has been done since his death, including my own small contributions.

The spam filter allows one or two links before it gets really angry — the rest of its defenses are based on keywords, plus whatever other algorithms Akismet uses. Just for future reference.

Abandoning positivism, we can see that knowledge about love can stand on the same scientific epistemic basis as any knowledge about any other non-positivistic entity, such as atoms, relativistic quantum fields, or the insides of bricks. The hypothesis that your wife loves you is falsifiable—by her acting in a consistently indifferent or hostile manner—and can thus be supported by actual evidence to the contrary.

That’s both true and not, because indifference and hostility are not always hallmarks of a lack of love. Indeed, depending on the person, they can be brought out by stress, hormonal shifts, or worry. More to the point, many medications (prednisone comes readily to mind) can stimulate those exact attitudes in a person — I know from first-hand experience, precisely because someone I love dearly was once on the aforementioned drug, and would often fly into psychosis-induced rages at the drop of a hat.

The real confusing factor in many of the above criteria is that the shift is not sudden, and therefore easily identifiable as being the result of some untoward cause. Instead, the transformation is gradual — it very much looks and feels like the person is becoming steadily and consistently angrier and more resentful, and very much looks and feels like they are “falling out of love” with you. This was certainly my own experience with this young woman of whom I speak.

But she had not ceased to love me — indeed, we’re getting married in October! — but the point is that based on most normal categories, I could have reasoned that she had, in fact, ceased to love me. I would have been wrong in drawing that conclusion, though. The human being is a very complex creature on a number of levels, and sometimes seemingly unrelated changes or issues can produce effects that will be falsely identified as evidence of a wholly different thing.

So while such things as love can sometimes be falsified, the criteria we might use to determine its falseness are not ideal, nor particularly suited to all situations — they are not universal. And so we cannot conclude, in any sweeping sense, that love, as a concept, is completely falsifiable.

You are also considerably more sanguine about non-teleological explanations for abiogenesis than am I. Until I see some actual evidence for a non-teleological origin of life, I remain agnostic. Of course, I insist on a natural explanation, i.e. a falsifiable hypothesis supported by the evidence of our senses.

I suppose I am sanguine about it, but only because I adopt a position that stipulates, as one of its core assumptions, that there is no inherent contradiction between the scientific explanation and the religious. That is to say, I am both certain that there was some natural mechanism by which the first cellular organisms arose, and at the same time I am certain that God, who ordains and sustains Creation, is the author of that process. I place no particular requirement on God, or on my faith, that it be the case that the creation of the Universe was quick, complete, and one hell of a special effects extravaganza (although I imagine that the early centuries of time would, assuming one could survive in the conditions, have been a visual feast).

And I find subtle hints about a gradual, non-spectacular creation even in Scripture. Again, I don’t take the events of Genesis 1 - 2 as literal history, but I do often note, in debates with Young Earth Creationists and other anti-evolutionists, that even in Genesis 2 we see God creating humanity out of something God had made already — dirt or clay in this case.

I realize that I’m probably being a touch eisegetical, but I tend to interpret such minutia as subtle hints as to the reality of how creation occurred — an ordained, sustained set of processes that began with early stellar formation and the production of heavier elements, and progressed over time through the formation of planets, complex chemical compounds, proteins, and then on to the first cellular organisms. From that point on, organic diversity increased…and, well, here we are today.

Now, as to the falsifiable hypothesis about the transition from non-living proteins and other compounds into living material, and as to the point about it being supported by our senses, I actually remain a bit doubtful that we will ever know exactly what transpired — mostly because it would seem that there is simply too much theory and conjecture stacked up all at once for us to ever accurately re-create the conditions under with the initial event occurred. At best, any lab trial that we set up which enables a re-enactment of those first chemical reactions (and what else have you) will be somewhat contrived, and little more than a “best guess”.

And finally, we come to the issue of falsifiability itself. Much the same as with positivism, there is a bit of an epistemological “error in judgment” being made in demanding that all explanations of all things be completely falsifiable before they are accepted as truth. The error, of course, is in the assumption that scientifically demonstrable — either through empirical evidence or through falsifiability — truths are the only truths. Where the problem, of course, is to be found in all this is that the assumption that the only truths are those which are scientifically defensible (according to the aforementioned criteria) is, in and of itself, not something that can be proven with any empirical evidence, nor is it an assertion which is demonstrably falsifiable.

My point here is not to denigrate scientific learning, epistemology, theory or research — those are all important things in determining what the Church calls “natural revelation”. My point is simply to note that such criteria, in and of themselves, are insufficient to describe the whole gamut of reality — in much the same way that sRGB cannot describe the whole gamut of visually-discernable color.

Let’s move on to religious epistemology.

There is nothing logically impossible about the existence of at least some conceptions of God, nor about some conceptions about revelatory epistemology, that we can know things by revelation—either direct or via scripture—from God. But mere logical possibility is not enough.

Your examples are entirely opaque. We can take it for granted that the endeavor might well be complicated—it’s definitely the case that scientific epistemology is complicated as well—but again, merely noting that it might be complicated is not an actual explanation.

And again, I draw your attention to what I stated was my ultimate goal with my brief, concluding example. I merely sought to illustrate that rote dismissal of the possibility of divine inspiration — i.e. the attitude that you demonstrated, somewhat, with your initial comment to me — is not a good analytical method (nor, of course, is rote acceptance that all religious texts must describe literal history — certainly some do, but not all).

I think I achieved that goal to a reasonably satisfying extent.

So… how does this revelatory epistemology actually work? Does it do the job we intuitively expect of an epistemic method? If not, what job does it do, and why should we change our intuitive expectations?

After many years of study, I am still unable to differentiate revelation—direct or scriptural—from the pure invention of the imagination. Pure invention does not do the job I expect of an epistemic method, and I see no good reason to change my expectations to accommodate it. So I am perhaps not the best candidate for establishing a definition of revelatory epistemology.

Still, I remain open-minded, and new information can always, at least in principle, change my mind. So tell me more about this revelation business, and don’t be afraid to go into the gory details.

My own qualifications are not ideal, for while I have some educational training as a theologian, my own background is not nearly so extensive as even that of the priests at my church, let alone the bishop here in Edmonton or the pope himself. So it’s with some reservation that I embark on this aspect of the discussion, because I don’t want to overstep the boundaries of my academic credentials or the limits of my own rhetorical skill.

To begin with, the ultimate truth of revelation is Christ — being both fully human and fully God — Himself. Of course, this opens the door to the question of what that means, exactly, and the answer is complex indeed: I could cite the entire text of the Bible, and much of the Catholic Catechism, and probably still not address the issue to your satisfaction, nor to mine. At some point, and at some level, one has to accept the presence of what the Church tends to call “mystery”, which I can generally sum up as being an acceptance of the fact that there are some things which are beyond the ability of human reason to discern. This is not a particularly wild assertion, because human reason — much like all creation — is finite.

Pope John Paul II noted much the same in Fides et ratio, one of the many encyclicals which he penned.

The truth of Christian Revelation, found in Jesus of Nazareth, enables all men and women to embrace the “mystery” of their own life. As absolute truth, it summons human beings to be open to the transcendent, whilst respecting both their autonomy as creatures and their freedom. At this point the relationship between freedom and truth is complete, and we understand the full meaning of the Lord’s words: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32).

Christian Revelation is the true lodestar of men and women as they strive to make their way amid the pressures of an immanentist habit of mind and the constrictions of a technocratic logic. It is the ultimate possibility offered by God for the human being to know in all its fullness the seminal plan of love which began with creation. To those wishing to know the truth, if they can look beyond themselves and their own concerns, there is given the possibility of taking full and harmonious possession of their lives, precisely by following the path of truth. Here the words of the Book of Deuteronomy are pertinent: “This commandment which I command you is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that you should say, ‘Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear and do it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, that you can do it” (30:11-14). This text finds an echo in the famous dictum of the holy philosopher and theologian Augustine: “Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth” (Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas).

These considerations prompt a first conclusion: the truth made known to us by Revelation is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument devised by human reason. It appears instead as something gratuitous, which itself stirs thought and seeks acceptance as an expression of love. This revealed truth is set within our history as an anticipation of that ultimate and definitive vision of God which is reserved for those who believe in him and seek him with a sincere heart. The ultimate purpose of personal existence, then, is the theme of philosophy and theology alike. For all their difference of method and content, both disciplines point to that “path of life” (Ps 16:11) which, as faith tells us, leads in the end to the full and lasting joy of the contemplation of the Triune God.

The Pope then goes on to not on the relation between faith and reason (and if you have only ever been exposed to a Protestant Biblical canon, and to Protestant exegesis of said canon, you will not have been exposed to much of what the Pope is about to say here):

Sacred Scripture indicates with remarkably clear cues how deeply related are the knowledge conferred by faith and the knowledge conferred by reason; and it is in the Wisdom literature that this relationship is addressed most explicitly. What is striking about these biblical texts, if they are read without prejudice, is that they embody not only the faith of Israel, but also the treasury of cultures and civilizations which have long vanished. As if by special design, the voices of Egypt and Mesopotamia sound again and certain features common to the cultures of the ancient Near East come to life in these pages which are so singularly rich in deep intuition.

It is no accident that, when the sacred author comes to describe the wise man, he portrays him as one who loves and seeks the truth: “Happy the man who meditates on wisdom and reasons intelligently, who reflects in his heart on her ways and ponders her secrets. He pursues her like a hunter and lies in wait on her paths. He peers through her windows and listens at her doors. He camps near her house and fastens his tent-peg to her walls; he pitches his tent near her and so finds an excellent resting-place; he places his children under her protection and lodges under her boughs; by her he is sheltered from the heat and he dwells in the shade of her glory” (Sir 14:20-27).

For the inspired writer, as we see, the desire for knowledge is characteristic of all people. Intelligence enables everyone, believer and non-believer, to reach “the deep waters” of knowledge (cf. Prov 20:5). It is true that ancient Israel did not come to knowledge of the world and its phenomena by way of abstraction, as did the Greek philosopher or the Egyptian sage. Still less did the good Israelite understand knowledge in the way of the modern world which tends more to distinguish different kinds of knowing. Nonetheless, the biblical world has made its own distinctive contribution to the theory of knowledge.

What is distinctive in the biblical text is the conviction that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of faith. The world and all that happens within it, including history and the fate of peoples, are realities to be observed, analysed and assessed with all the resources of reason, but without faith ever being foreign to the process. Faith intervenes not to abolish reason’s autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts. Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them. Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence. Here the words of the Book of Proverbs are pertinent: “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps” (16:9). This is to say that with the light of reason human beings can know which path to take, but they can follow that path to its end, quickly and unhindered, only if with a rightly tuned spirit they search for it within the horizon of faith. Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way.

There is thus no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith: each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action. Again the Book of Proverbs points in this direction when it exclaims: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov 25:2). In their respective worlds, God and the human being are set within a unique relationship. In God there lies the origin of all things, in him is found the fullness of the mystery, and in this his glory consists; to men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists. The Psalmist adds one final piece to this mosaic when he says in prayer: “How deep to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I try to count them, they are more than the sand. If I come to the end, I am still with you” (139:17-18). The desire for knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experience of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered.

All of this is, of course, intended without stain of positivism, and is not set out to prove, conclusively, that God exists, because such enterprise is folly. Nor does it particularly address the methodology of revelatory epistemology — in fact, in a sense, it really only exists to establish a foundation upon which to build more complex defenses of the idea. For example, the former Pontiff further notes:

The Book of Wisdom contains several important texts which cast further light on this theme. There the sacred author speaks of God who reveals himself in nature. For the ancients, the study of the natural sciences coincided in large part with philosophical learning. Having affirmed that with their intelligence human beings can “know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements… the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts” (Wis 7:17, 19-20)—in a word, that he can philosophize—the sacred text takes a significant step forward. Making his own the thought of Greek philosophy, to which he seems to refer in the context, the author affirms that, in reasoning about nature, the human being can rise to God: “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5). This is to recognize as a first stage of divine Revelation the marvellous “book of nature”, which, when read with the proper tools of human reason, can lead to knowledge of the Creator. If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as Creator of all, it is not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their sinfulness place an impediment in the way.

The concept of natural revelation (”the heavens declare the glory of God”) plays a huge role in revelatory epistemology, and I have touched on this issue only in passing, when I noted that “[if] we accept that theories like evolution are truthful propositions for how it is that life arose on this planet, then if Scripture is true it can be wholly and completely reconciled to that scientific truth.”

Of course, determining the scope and effect of natural revelation is a discussion and discipline all its own, and in a sense is far beyond the limitations both of this discussion and the time constraints my day-to-day life operates under. Exactly what form natural revelation takes is a particularly long and involved discussion, although it can perhaps briefly be hinted at here without straying into “argument from design”.

Essentially, and St. Paul illustrates this wonderfully in the Epistle to the Romans, the “eyes of the mind” can come to know God through the perception of those things in nature which stir the human faculties for reason and intuition. This manifests itself in any number of ways, from being moved by a particularly beautiful sunset (as I was last night, in fact) or other natural scene to being inspired, upon witnessing such beauty as that, to create an artistic representation that is able to convey the beauty and power of the experience to others who were not able to share in it initially. That is certainly why, for example, I tend to take a lot of pictures of sunrises and sunsets — in my home province of Alberta, especially, our climate is such that the interaction of Sun, clouds, and sky in creating beautiful images which are pleasing to the eye, mind, and heart is both unique and poignant in its effect.

What this essentially comes to is that by parsing, analyzing, and interpreting the data provided by the senses, the fullest experience of reason can begin to engage the “human capacity for metaphysical enquiry”.

Now…how do we translate the experience of natural revelation upwards and outwards into the broader categories of revelatory epistemology? More to the point, can the attempt even be made?

This is why the Christian’s relationship to philosophy requires thorough-going discernment. In the New Testament, especially in the Letters of Saint Paul, one thing emerges with great clarity: the opposition between “the wisdom of this world” and the wisdom of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The depth of revealed wisdom disrupts the cycle of our habitual patterns of thought, which are in no way able to express that wisdom in its fullness.

The beginning of the First Letter to the Corinthians poses the dilemma in a radical way. The crucified Son of God is the historic event upon which every attempt of the mind to construct an adequate explanation of the meaning of existence upon merely human argumentation comes to grief. The true key-point, which challenges every philosophy, is Jesus Christ’s death on the Cross. It is here that every attempt to reduce the Father’s saving plan to purely human logic is doomed to failure. “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the learned? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor 1:20), the Apostle asks emphatically. The wisdom of the wise is no longer enough for what God wants to accomplish; what is required is a decisive step towards welcoming something radically new: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise…; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Cor 1:27-28). Human wisdom refuses to see in its own weakness the possibility of its strength; yet Saint Paul is quick to affirm: “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10). Man cannot grasp how death could be the source of life and love; yet to reveal the mystery of his saving plan God has chosen precisely that which reason considers “foolishness” and a “scandal”. Adopting the language of the philosophers of his time, Paul comes to the summit of his teaching as he speaks the paradox: “God has chosen in the world… that which is nothing to reduce to nothing things that are” (cf. 1 Cor 1:28). In order to express the gratuitous nature of the love revealed in the Cross of Christ, the Apostle is not afraid to use the most radical language of the philosophers in their thinking about God. Reason cannot eliminate the mystery of love which the Cross represents, while the Cross can give to reason the ultimate answer which it seeks. It is not the wisdom of words, but the Word of Wisdom which Saint Paul offers as the criterion of both truth and salvation.

Faith — Christian faith, at least — is presupposed on a rather paradoxical concept, that a transcendent and mighty God could so love His Creation that He would humble Himself to become a servant for the lowly, and ultimately die at our hands that we might live with Him in eternity. Note the use of the term paradox, rather than anything which explicitly suggests a formal contradiction.

Human reason struggles to understand such a wild assertion as this, precisely because it makes no sense in light of human experience and the way the world works, when we look either at the ‘brutal Darwinian’ processes on evidence in nature, or at the function of human governments and societies. Of course, a struggle to make sense of something does not invalidate that thing which it is a struggle to understand, any more than a third grader’s struggle to understand multiplication invalidates multivariable calculus, or any other branch of mathematics.

At the core of human reason is the desire to understand (some of us are more afflicted by this than others, and I here cite myself as an example), but the methodologies we employ to reach that state are sometimes suspect. Proper inquiry into revelatory epistemology, then, entails a very different mindset than what we might otherwise be accustomed to. And I have hinted at this as well, in noting the inherent limitations of falsifiability and empiricism.

“All human beings desire to know”, and truth is the proper object of this desire. Everyday life shows how concerned each of us is to discover for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, how things really are. Within visible creation, man is the only creature who not only is capable of knowing but who knows that he knows, and is therefore interested in the real truth of what he perceives. People cannot be genuinely indifferent to the question of whether what they know is true or not. If they discover that it is false, they reject it; but if they can establish its truth, they feel themselves rewarded. It is this that Saint Augustine teaches when he writes: “I have met many who wanted to deceive, but none who wanted to be deceived”. It is rightly claimed that persons have reached adulthood when they can distinguish independently between truth and falsehood, making up their own minds about the objective reality of things. This is what has driven so many enquiries, especially in the scientific field, which in recent centuries have produced important results, leading to genuine progress for all humanity.

No less important than research in the theoretical field is research in the practical field—by which I mean the search for truth which looks to the good which is to be performed. In acting ethically, according to a free and rightly tuned will, the human person sets foot upon the path to happiness and moves towards perfection. Here too it is a question of truth. It is this conviction which I stressed in my Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor: “There is no morality without freedom… Although each individual has a right to be respected in his own journey in search of the truth, there exists a prior moral obligation, and a grave one at that, to seek the truth and to adhere to it once it is known”.

It is essential, therefore, that the values chosen and pursued in one’s life be true, because only true values can lead people to realize themselves fully, allowing them to be true to their nature. The truth of these values is to be found not by turning in on oneself but by opening oneself to apprehend that truth even at levels which transcend the person. This is an essential condition for us to become ourselves and to grow as mature, adult persons.

The truth comes initially to the human being as a question: Does life have a meaning? Where is it going? At first sight, personal existence may seem completely meaningless. It is not necessary to turn to the philosophers of the absurd or to the provocative questioning found in the Book of Job in order to have doubts about life’s meaning. The daily experience of suffering—in one’s own life and in the lives of others—and the array of facts which seem inexplicable to reason are enough to ensure that a question as dramatic as the question of meaning cannot be evaded. Moreover, the first absolutely certain truth of our life, beyond the fact that we exist, is the inevitability of our death. Given this unsettling fact, the search for a full answer is inescapable. Each of us has both the desire and the duty to know the truth of our own destiny. We want to know if death will be the definitive end of our life or if there is something beyond—if it is possible to hope for an after-life or not. It is not insignificant that the death of Socrates gave philosophy one of its decisive orientations, no less decisive now than it was more than two thousand years ago. It is not by chance, then, that faced with the fact of death philosophers have again and again posed this question, together with the question of the meaning of life and immortality.

No-one can avoid this questioning, neither the philosopher nor the ordinary person. The answer we give will determine whether or not we think it possible to attain universal and absolute truth; and this is a decisive moment of the search. Every truth—if it really is truth—presents itself as universal, even if it is not the whole truth. If something is true, then it must be true for all people and at all times. Beyond this universality, however, people seek an absolute which might give to all their searching a meaning and an answer—something ultimate, which might serve as the ground of all things. In other words, they seek a final explanation, a supreme value, which refers to nothing beyond itself and which puts an end to all questioning. Hypotheses may fascinate, but they do not satisfy. Whether we admit it or not, there comes for everyone the moment when personal existence must be anchored to a truth recognized as final, a truth which confers a certitude no longer open to doubt.

Through the centuries, philosophers have sought to discover and articulate such a truth, giving rise to various systems and schools of thought. But beyond philosophical systems, people seek in different ways to shape a “philosophy” of their own—in personal convictions and experiences, in traditions of family and culture, or in journeys in search of life’s meaning under the guidance of a master. What inspires all of these is the desire to reach the certitude of truth and the certitude of its absolute value.

The search for truth, of course, is not always so transparent nor does it always produce such results. The natural limitation of reason and the inconstancy of the heart often obscure and distort a person’s search. Truth can also drown in a welter of other concerns. People can even run from the truth as soon as they glimpse it because they are afraid of its demands. Yet, for all that they may evade it, the truth still influences life. Life in fact can never be grounded upon doubt, uncertainty or deceit; such an existence would be threatened constantly by fear and anxiety. One may define the human being, therefore, as the one who seeks the truth.

It is unthinkable that a search so deeply rooted in human nature would be completely vain and useless. The capacity to search for truth and to pose questions itself implies the rudiments of a response. Human beings would not even begin to search for something of which they knew nothing or for something which they thought was wholly beyond them. Only the sense that they can arrive at an answer leads them to take the first step. This is what normally happens in scientific research. When scientists, following their intuition, set out in search of the logical and verifiable explanation of a phenomenon, they are confident from the first that they will find an answer, and they do not give up in the face of setbacks. They do not judge their original intuition useless simply because they have not reached their goal; rightly enough they will say that they have not yet found a satisfactory answer.

The same must be equally true of the search for truth when it comes to the ultimate questions. The thirst for truth is so rooted in the human heart that to be obliged to ignore it would cast our existence into jeopardy. Everyday life shows well enough how each one of us is preoccupied by the pressure of a few fundamental questions and how in the soul of each of us there is at least an outline of the answers. One reason why the truth of these answers convinces is that they are no different in substance from the answers to which many others have come. To be sure, not every truth to which we come has the same value. But the sum of the results achieved confirms that in principle the human being can arrive at the truth.

It may help, then, to turn briefly to the different modes of truth. Most of them depend upon immediate evidence or are confirmed by experimentation. This is the mode of truth proper to everyday life and to scientific research. At another level we find philosophical truth, attained by means of the speculative powers of the human intellect. Finally, there are religious truths which are to some degree grounded in philosophy, and which we find in the answers which the different religious traditions offer to the ultimate questions.

The truths of philosophy, it should be said, are not restricted only to the sometimes ephemeral teachings of professional philosophers. All men and women, as I have noted, are in some sense philosophers and have their own philosophical conceptions with which they direct their lives. In one way or other, they shape a comprehensive vision and an answer to the question of life’s meaning; and in the light of this they interpret their own life’s course and regulate their behaviour. At this point, we may pose the question of the link between, on the one hand, the truths of philosophy and religion and, on the other, the truth revealed in Jesus Christ. But before tackling that question, one last datum of philosophy needs to be weighed.

Human beings are not made to live alone. They are born into a family and in a family they grow, eventually entering society through their activity. From birth, therefore, they are immersed in traditions which give them not only a language and a cultural formation but also a range of truths in which they believe almost instinctively. Yet personal growth and maturity imply that these same truths can be cast into doubt and evaluated through a process of critical enquiry. It may be that, after this time of transition, these truths are “recovered” as a result of the experience of life or by dint of further reasoning. Nonetheless, there are in the life of a human being many more truths which are simply believed than truths which are acquired by way of personal verification. Who, for instance, could assess critically the countless scientific findings upon which modern life is based? Who could personally examine the flow of information which comes day after day from all parts of the world and which is generally accepted as true? Who in the end could forge anew the paths of experience and thought which have yielded the treasures of human wisdom and religion? This means that the human being—the one who seeks the truth—is also the one who lives by belief.

In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other hand, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person’s capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring.

It should be stressed that the truths sought in this interpersonal relationship are not primarily empirical or philosophical. Rather, what is sought is the truth of the person—what the person is and what the person reveals from deep within. Human perfection, then, consists not simply in acquiring an abstract knowledge of the truth, but in a dynamic relationship of faithful self-giving with others. It is in this faithful self-giving that a person finds a fullness of certainty and security. At the same time, however, knowledge through belief, grounded as it is on trust between persons, is linked to truth: in the act of believing, men and women entrust themselves to the truth which the other declares to them.

Any number of examples could be found to demonstrate this; but I think immediately of the martyrs, who are the most authentic witnesses to the truth about existence. The martyrs know that they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no-one could ever take this certainty from them. Neither suffering nor violent death could ever lead them to abandon the truth which they have discovered in the encounter with Christ. This is why to this day the witness of the martyrs continues to arouse such interest, to draw agreement, to win such a hearing and to invite emulation. This is why their word inspires such confidence: from the moment they speak to us of what we perceive deep down as the truth we have sought for so long, the martyrs provide evidence of a love that has no need of lengthy arguments in order to convince. The martyrs stir in us a profound trust because they give voice to what we already feel and they declare what we would like to have the strength to express.

What the Pope is speaking of here, of course, is the role of tradition as a component of proper interpretation and understanding of revelation: we do not interpret Scripture de novo, but instead build upon the wisdom of those who have gone before, sometimes augmenting and sometimes expanding on the concepts that they have begun to explore. This is, of course, a fairly sensible way of doing things — indeed, Barefoot, you note on your own blog the virtue of locating the baby in the bathwater (and thus, by extension, not throwing the bathwater out too prematurely).

In other words, one necessary component of proper revelatory epistemology is the historical component of Scriptural exegesis and hermeneutics, and the wisdom gleaned from the texts by previous scholars and theologians. This also includes interpreting Scripture in light of both modern and historical evidence and reasoning — see again my example of interpreting Genesis 1 - 2, and note how attention must be given in forming that small exegesis to both the science of the ancient Near East and the science of the modern era.

Step by step, then, we are assembling the terms of the question. It is the nature of the human being to seek the truth. This search looks not only to the attainment of truths which are partial, empirical or scientific; nor is it only in individual acts of decision-making that people seek the true good. Their search looks towards an ulterior truth which would explain the meaning of life. And it is therefore a search which can reach its end only in reaching the absolute. Thanks to the inherent capacities of thought, man is able to encounter and recognize a truth of this kind. Such a truth—vital and necessary as it is for life—is attained not only by way of reason but also through trusting acquiescence to other persons who can guarantee the authenticity and certainty of the truth itself. There is no doubt that the capacity to entrust oneself and one’s life to another person and the decision to do so are among the most significant and expressive human acts.

It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical enquiry.

From all that I have said to this point it emerges that men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable—a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves. Christian faith comes to meet them, offering the concrete possibility of reaching the goal which they seek. Moving beyond the stage of simple believing, Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God. In Jesus Christ, who is the Truth, faith recognizes the ultimate appeal to humanity, an appeal made in order that what we experience as desire and nostalgia may come to its fulfilment.

This truth, which God reveals to us in Jesus Christ, is not opposed to the truths which philosophy perceives. On the contrary, the two modes of knowledge lead to truth in all its fullness. The unity of truth is a fundamental premise of human reasoning, as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear. Revelation renders this unity certain, showing that the God of creation is also the God of salvation history. It is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend, and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This unity of truth, natural and revealed, is embodied in a living and personal way in Christ, as the Apostle reminds us: “Truth is in Jesus” (cf. Eph 4:21; Col 1:15-20). He is the eternal Word in whom all things were created, and he is the incarnate Word who in his entire person reveals the Father (cf. Jn 1:14, 18). What human reason seeks “without knowing it” (cf. Acts 17:23) can be found only through Christ: what is revealed in him is “the full truth” (cf. Jn 1:14-16) of everything which was created in him and through him and which therefore in him finds its fulfilment (cf. Col 1:17).

On the basis of these broad considerations, we must now explore more directly the relationship between revealed truth and philosophy. This relationship imposes a twofold consideration, since the truth conferred by Revelation is a truth to be understood in the light of reason. It is this duality alone which allows us to specify correctly the relationship between revealed truth and philosophical learning. First, then, let us consider the links between faith and philosophy in the course of history. From this, certain principles will emerge as useful reference-points in the attempt to establish the correct link between the two orders of knowledge.

The Acts of the Apostles provides evidence that Christian proclamation was engaged from the very first with the philosophical currents of the time. In Athens, we read, Saint Paul entered into discussion with “certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers” (17:18); and exegetical analysis of his speech at the Areopagus has revealed frequent allusions to popular beliefs deriving for the most part from Stoicism. This is by no means accidental. If pagans were to understand them, the first Christians could not refer only to “Moses and the prophets” when they spoke. They had to point as well to natural knowledge of God and to the voice of conscience in every human being (cf. Rom 1:19-21; 2:14-15; Acts 14:16-17). Since in pagan religion this natural knowledge had lapsed into idolatry (cf. Rom 1:21-32), the Apostle judged it wiser in his speech to make the link with the thinking of the philosophers, who had always set in opposition to the myths and mystery cults notions more respectful of divine transcendence.

One of the major concerns of classical philosophy was to purify human notions of God of mythological elements. We know that Greek religion, like most cosmic religions, was polytheistic, even to the point of divinizing natural things and phenomena. Human attempts to understand the origin of the gods and hence the origin of the universe find their earliest expression in poetry; and the theogonies remain the first evidence of this human search. But it was the task of the fathers of philosophy to bring to light the link between reason and religion. As they broadened their view to include universal principles, they no longer rested content with the ancient myths, but wanted to provide a rational foundation for their belief in the divinity. This opened a path which took its rise from ancient traditions but allowed a development satisfying the demands of universal reason. This development sought to acquire a critical awareness of what they believed in, and the concept of divinity was the prime beneficiary of this. Superstitions were recognized for what they were and religion was, at least in part, purified by rational analysis. It was on this basis that the Fathers of the Church entered into fruitful dialogue with ancient philosophy, which offered new ways of proclaiming and understanding the God of Jesus Christ.

In tracing Christianity’s adoption of philosophy, one should not forget how cautiously Christians regarded other elements of the cultural world of paganism, one example of which is gnosticism. It was easy to confuse philosophy—understood as practical wisdom and an education for life—with a higher and esoteric kind of knowledge, reserved to those few who were perfect. It is surely this kind of esoteric speculation which Saint Paul has in mind when he puts the Colossians on their guard: “See to it that no-one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe and not according to Christ” (2:8). The Apostle’s words seem all too pertinent now if we apply them to the various kinds of esoteric superstition widespread today, even among some believers who lack a proper critical sense. Following Saint Paul, other writers of the early centuries, especially Saint Irenaeus and Tertullian, sound the alarm when confronted with a cultural perspective which sought to subordinate the truth of Revelation to the interpretation of the philosophers.

Christianity’s engagement with philosophy was therefore neither straight-forward nor immediate. The practice of philosophy and attendance at philosophical schools seemed to the first Christians more of a disturbance than an opportunity. For them, the first and most urgent task was the proclamation of the Risen Christ by way of a personal encounter which would bring the listener to conversion of heart and the request for Baptism. But that does not mean that they ignored the task of deepening the understanding of faith and its motivations. Quite the contrary. That is why the criticism of Celsus—that Christians were “illiterate and uncouth”—is unfounded and untrue. Their initial disinterest is to be explained on other grounds. The encounter with the Gospel offered such a satisfying answer to the hitherto unresolved question of life’s meaning that delving into the philosophers seemed to them something remote and in some ways outmoded.

That seems still more evident today, if we think of Christianity’s contribution to the affirmation of the right of everyone to have access to the truth. In dismantling barriers of race, social status and gender, Christianity proclaimed from the first the equality of all men and women before God. One prime implication of this touched the theme of truth. The elitism which had characterized the ancients’ search for truth was clearly abandoned. Since access to the truth enables access to God, it must be denied to none. There are many paths which lead to truth, but since Christian truth has a salvific value, any one of these paths may be taken, as long as it leads to the final goal, that is to the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

A pioneer of positive engagement with philosophical thinking—albeit with cautious discernment—was Saint Justin. Although he continued to hold Greek philosophy in high esteem after his conversion, Justin claimed with power and clarity that he had found in Christianity “the only sure and profitable philosophy”. Similarly, Clement of Alexandria called the Gospel “the true philosophy”, and he understood philosophy, like the Mosaic Law, as instruction which prepared for Christian faith and paved the way for the Gospel. Since “philosophy yearns for the wisdom which consists in rightness of soul and speech and in purity of life, it is well disposed towards wisdom and does all it can to acquire it. We call philosophers those who love the wisdom that is creator and mistress of all things, that is knowledge of the Son of God”. For Clement, Greek philosophy is not meant in the first place to bolster and complete Christian truth. Its task is rather the defence of the faith: “The teaching of the Saviour is perfect in itself and has no need of support, because it is the strength and the wisdom of God. Greek philosophy, with its contribution, does not strengthen truth; but, in rendering the attack of sophistry impotent and in disarming those who betray truth and wage war upon it, Greek philosophy is rightly called the hedge and the protective wall around the vineyard”.

It is clear from history, then, that Christian thinkers were critical in adopting philosophical thought. Among the early examples of this, Origen is certainly outstanding. In countering the attacks launched by the philosopher Celsus, Origen adopts Platonic philosophy to shape his argument and mount his reply. Assuming many elements of Platonic thought, he begins to construct an early form of Christian theology. The name “theology” itself, together with the idea of theology as rational discourse about God, had to this point been tied to its Greek origins. In Aristotelian philosophy, for example, the name signified the noblest part and the true summit of philosophical discourse. But in the light of Christian Revelation what had signified a generic doctrine about the gods assumed a wholly new meaning, signifying now the reflection undertaken by the believer in order to express the true doctrine about God. As it developed, this new Christian thought made use of philosophy, but at the same time tended to distinguish itself clearly from philosophy. History shows how Platonic thought, once adopted by theology, underwent profound changes, especially with regard to concepts such as the immortality of the soul, the divinization of man and the origin of evil.

In this work of christianizing Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius called the Areopagite and especially Saint Augustine were important. The great Doctor of the West had come into contact with different philosophical schools, but all of them left him disappointed. It was when he encountered the truth of Christian faith that he found strength to undergo the radical conversion to which the philosophers he had known had been powerless to lead him. He himself reveals his motive: “From this time on, I gave my preference to the Catholic faith. I thought it more modest and not in the least misleading to be told by the Church to believe what could not be demonstrated—whether that was because a demonstration existed but could not be understood by all or whether the matter was not one open to rational proof—rather than from the Manichees to have a rash promise of knowledge with mockery of mere belief, and then afterwards to be ordered to believe many fabulous and absurd myths impossible to prove true”. Though he accorded the Platonists a place of privilege, Augustine rebuked them because, knowing the goal to seek, they had ignored the path which leads to it: the Word made flesh. The Bishop of Hippo succeeded in producing the first great synthesis of philosophy and theology, embracing currents of thought both Greek and Latin. In him too the great unity of knowledge, grounded in the thought of the Bible, was both confirmed and sustained by a depth of speculative thinking. The synthesis devised by Saint Augustine remained for centuries the most exalted form of philosophical and theological speculation known to the West. Reinforced by his personal story and sustained by a wonderful holiness of life, he could also introduce into his works a range of material which, drawing on experience, was a prelude to future developments in different currents of philosophy.

The ways in which the Fathers of East and West engaged the philosophical schools were, therefore, quite different. This does not mean that they identified the content of their message with the systems to which they referred. Consider Tertullian’s question: “What does Athens have in common with Jerusalem? The Academy with the Church?”. This clearly indicates the critical consciousness with which Christian thinkers from the first confronted the problem of the relationship between faith and philosophy, viewing it comprehensively with both its positive aspects and its limitations. They were not naive thinkers. Precisely because they were intense in living faith’s content they were able to reach the deepest forms of speculation. It is therefore minimalizing and mistaken to restrict their work simply to the transposition of the truths of faith into philosophical categories. They did much more. In fact they succeeded in disclosing completely all that remained implicit and preliminary in the thinking of the great philosophers of antiquity. As I have noted, theirs was the task of showing how reason, freed from external constraints, could find its way out of the blind alley of myth and open itself to the transcendent in a more appropriate way. Purified and rightly tuned, therefore, reason could rise to the higher planes of thought, providing a solid foundation for the perception of being, of the transcendent and of the absolute.

It is here that we see the originality of what the Fathers accomplished. They fully welcomed reason which was open to the absolute, and they infused it with the richness drawn from Revelation. This was more than a meeting of cultures, with one culture perhaps succumbing to the fascination of the other. It happened rather in the depths of human souls, and it was a meeting of creature and Creator. Surpassing the goal towards which it unwittingly tended by dint of its nature, reason attained the supreme good and ultimate truth in the person of the Word made flesh. Faced with the various philosophies, the Fathers were not afraid to acknowledge those elements in them that were consonant with Revelation and those that were not. Recognition of the points of convergence did not blind them to the points of divergence.

In Scholastic theology, the role of philosophically trained reason becomes even more conspicuous under the impulse of Saint Anselm’s interpretation of the intellectus fidei. For the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury the priority of faith is not in competition with the search which is proper to reason. Reason in fact is not asked to pass judgement on the contents of faith, something of which it would be incapable, since this is not its function. Its function is rather to find meaning, to discover explanations which might allow everyone to come to a certain understanding of the contents of faith. Saint Anselm underscores the fact that the intellect must seek that which it loves: the more it loves, the more it desires to know. Whoever lives for the truth is reaching for a form of knowledge which is fired more and more with love for what it knows, while having to admit that it has not yet attained what it desires: “To see you was I conceived; and I have yet to conceive that for which I was conceived (Ad te videndum factus sum; et nondum feci propter quod factus sum)”. The desire for truth, therefore, spurs reason always to go further; indeed, it is as if reason were overwhelmed to see that it can always go beyond what it has already achieved. It is at this point, though, that reason can learn where its path will lead in the end: “I think that whoever investigates something incomprehensible should be satisfied if, by way of reasoning, he reaches a quite certain perception of its reality, even if his intellect cannot penetrate its mode of being… But is there anything so incomprehensible and ineffable as that which is above all things? Therefore, if that which until now has been a matter of debate concerning the highest essence has been established on the basis of due reasoning, then the foundation of one’s certainty is not shaken in the least if the intellect cannot penetrate it in a way that allows clear formulation. If prior thought has concluded rationally that one cannot comprehend (rationabiliter comprehendit incomprehensibile esse) how supernal wisdom knows its own accomplishments…, who then will explain how this same wisdom, of which the human being can know nothing or next to nothing, is to be known and expressed?”.

The fundamental harmony between the knowledge of faith and the knowledge of philosophy is once again confirmed. Faith asks that its object be understood with the help of reason; and at the summit of its searching reason acknowledges that it cannot do without what faith presents.

I will conclude here, both because this is a staggeringly lengthy blog post and because I think that at this point I’ve begun to “scratch the surface of the tip of [the] iceberg” of what constitutes effective and proper revelatory epistemology. Though I would very much love to continue, I’m sure that all the above will occupy your thought for some time as it is, and so I will pause here to reflect on a few closing matters.

Firstly, I don’t know the extent of your exposure to Christian exegesis, but given that you would seem to be from the U.S. I’m willing to bet that the majority of what you have been exposed to is of a Protestant nature. I will not speak from within that context, both because I am not of a Protestant denomination myself and because I do not condone or endorse Protestant epistemology as a matter of course. Where it agrees with Catholic teaching, I will of course simply elect to use the Catholic teaching it agrees with, and where it diverges from Catholic teaching I attribute it to exegetical error.

I regard the Catholic Magisterium as the sole valid authority on Christian teaching, especially as it relates to epistemology, revelation, and the interplay of science and religion, because (unlike the various hierarchies of my Protestant bretheren) it has never abandoned its academic and scholarly traditions. Additionally, the Church has an active role and interest in the sciences and in research and discovery, as evidenced by institutions like the Vatican Observatory, and has both understood and sought to define the mutual relationship between science and faith.

The final point to make, though, is that to begin the discussion of what constitutes valid revelatory epistemology, one must first be open to the possibility that revelation may contain truths, and that some of those truths may be beyond the ability of scientific reason alone to define, describe, or discern. One doesn’t necessarily need to be a believer, but there is an argument to be made that an openness to faith, if not a pre-requisite, is at least a very highly recommended thing.