Excellent article we so need. I feel that Thomas if he came to life now, would be sad that we have treated his work as a frozen relic.
Thomas voracious read and engaged with the frontiers of knowledge and philosophy. Like you said, he engaged with everyone, keeping what was good and going beyond where he needed to - see active indifference in response to Avicenna, and his subsistent relations which is almost oxymoronic in Aristotelian terms.
We need to retrieve Thomism the activity, and not just Thomism the fixed system.
Yes, exactly. The activity, not just the system. Lots to like about the system too, philosophy needs to be an ongoing effort, not just a preservation project.
So I generally love this, but this is where I suddenly and sharply descend:
"Dogma has a bad name in modern times; we tend to see it as the enemy of reason. And indeed, dogma does potentially demand a kind of blind obedience."
No, it doesn't, and such blind obedience could not be given by an honest man. But it's not necessary, because the evidence for Christianity is sufficient. No blind obedience needed.
And this is the importance of C.S Lewis. He never makes the "blind obedience" move. Occasionally he specifically condemns it. He defends Christianity in Cartesian fashion, from first principles and perceptions.
I do the same thing in my book *The Grand Coherence,* but I'm not blazing a trail, just updating Lewis.
Lewis has a high confidence in human reason, but doesn’t think it can reach certain defining Christian truths such as the Incarnation and the Trinity. His recommended path to faith allows reason to clear the way in a sense, to the point where Christian truth seems highly probable, the best available option.
I’m happy with that suggestion; if it’s worked for you, great. And yet it’s clearly possible for a person to reach a point where he believes that his natural reason has suggested that core teachings of Christian dogma are actually false. In that case, I believe the right course is to say, “my natural reason must have erred. I worked this sum wrong. I’ll go back and rework it.” (Alternatively, just let it go. But it’s fine to rework it! Which is a crucial point I do not believe in blind faith if that implies that there’s ever a point where we are *supposed to* switch our rational faculties off, as it were. That’s crossing the border into fundamentalism.)
I think that stance (if my reason says this, it must be in error), could be viewed as a form of blind obedience. Anyway that’s what I had in mind.
I think Lewis thought that you can't deduce the Trinity from pure reason. But you can accept the Trinity on the testimony of others, as we accept many other things. The Incarnation certainly is believed on evidence; eyewitness testimony says that this man said and did such things, and it follows from that that He must be God. You couldn't have concluded precisely that that is what must happen, if you hadn't been told. But normal evidence leads you there.
I think Lewis could be quoted disagreeing with you on the case where natural reason leads you to a conclusion contrary to the faith. I think he says explicitly that leaving the Church is the first religious thing that some people do, because it's motivated by intellectual honesty, whereas their practice of Christianity had been mere conformism. I wouldn't recommend to someone to leave Christianity because of honest doubts; I would seek to argue them out of those doubts. But I wouldn't condemn someone who did leave Christianity for that reason.
The intellect is not the only faculty God gave us with some capacity to grasp the truth. One has to *tell* the truth but the process by which one reaches it could be more intellectual for some and less for others.
I also think your account (I’m not quite sure where Lewis falls) underestimates the level of mystery in Christian faith, the extent to which some parts are deeply mysterious, truly beyond our ken. I think some parts of the faith are best understood as fruitful mysteries; we can’t really understand them but we can see “what they do,” how they’ve held Christian faith together. Maybe that amounts to a kind of inductive or probability-based argument for belief. Maybe? But I don’t think one has to take that route to have a properly grounded faith.
I very much believe that human beings should use their God-given reason, and should never agree to *turn off* their reason because they’re displeased by what it yielded. But I also believe that faith is a gift of grace, and that some mysteries of Christianity are mostly impenetrable to human reason, at least here below.
One has to tell the truth. The right reason to become a Christian is that, having thought about it, one has come to the conclusion that Christianity is true.
There can be a high degree of convergent certainty at these things. How likely is it that the law of gravity is not true, or the 2 + 2 does not equal 4? Just because a belief has a rational basis does not mean that it is fragile or tenuous.
Now, there is a different but related question of how to refute the skeptic. In a certain sense, faith is a necessity not so much for Christianity as for science and common sense. Just because the sun has risen 10,000 times does not logically entail that it will rise tomorrow.
But there need be no particular epistemic discontinuity about believing in Christianity relative to all sorts of everyday beliefs.
Excellent article we so need. I feel that Thomas if he came to life now, would be sad that we have treated his work as a frozen relic.
Thomas voracious read and engaged with the frontiers of knowledge and philosophy. Like you said, he engaged with everyone, keeping what was good and going beyond where he needed to - see active indifference in response to Avicenna, and his subsistent relations which is almost oxymoronic in Aristotelian terms.
We need to retrieve Thomism the activity, and not just Thomism the fixed system.
Yes, exactly. The activity, not just the system. Lots to like about the system too, philosophy needs to be an ongoing effort, not just a preservation project.
So I generally love this, but this is where I suddenly and sharply descend:
"Dogma has a bad name in modern times; we tend to see it as the enemy of reason. And indeed, dogma does potentially demand a kind of blind obedience."
No, it doesn't, and such blind obedience could not be given by an honest man. But it's not necessary, because the evidence for Christianity is sufficient. No blind obedience needed.
And this is the importance of C.S Lewis. He never makes the "blind obedience" move. Occasionally he specifically condemns it. He defends Christianity in Cartesian fashion, from first principles and perceptions.
I do the same thing in my book *The Grand Coherence,* but I'm not blazing a trail, just updating Lewis.
So, you think a person should reject a core principle of dogma if his best rational analysis leads him to the conclusion that it’s wrong?
Lewis has a high confidence in human reason, but doesn’t think it can reach certain defining Christian truths such as the Incarnation and the Trinity. His recommended path to faith allows reason to clear the way in a sense, to the point where Christian truth seems highly probable, the best available option.
I’m happy with that suggestion; if it’s worked for you, great. And yet it’s clearly possible for a person to reach a point where he believes that his natural reason has suggested that core teachings of Christian dogma are actually false. In that case, I believe the right course is to say, “my natural reason must have erred. I worked this sum wrong. I’ll go back and rework it.” (Alternatively, just let it go. But it’s fine to rework it! Which is a crucial point I do not believe in blind faith if that implies that there’s ever a point where we are *supposed to* switch our rational faculties off, as it were. That’s crossing the border into fundamentalism.)
I think that stance (if my reason says this, it must be in error), could be viewed as a form of blind obedience. Anyway that’s what I had in mind.
I think Lewis thought that you can't deduce the Trinity from pure reason. But you can accept the Trinity on the testimony of others, as we accept many other things. The Incarnation certainly is believed on evidence; eyewitness testimony says that this man said and did such things, and it follows from that that He must be God. You couldn't have concluded precisely that that is what must happen, if you hadn't been told. But normal evidence leads you there.
I think Lewis could be quoted disagreeing with you on the case where natural reason leads you to a conclusion contrary to the faith. I think he says explicitly that leaving the Church is the first religious thing that some people do, because it's motivated by intellectual honesty, whereas their practice of Christianity had been mere conformism. I wouldn't recommend to someone to leave Christianity because of honest doubts; I would seek to argue them out of those doubts. But I wouldn't condemn someone who did leave Christianity for that reason.
“Having thought about it…”
The intellect is not the only faculty God gave us with some capacity to grasp the truth. One has to *tell* the truth but the process by which one reaches it could be more intellectual for some and less for others.
I also think your account (I’m not quite sure where Lewis falls) underestimates the level of mystery in Christian faith, the extent to which some parts are deeply mysterious, truly beyond our ken. I think some parts of the faith are best understood as fruitful mysteries; we can’t really understand them but we can see “what they do,” how they’ve held Christian faith together. Maybe that amounts to a kind of inductive or probability-based argument for belief. Maybe? But I don’t think one has to take that route to have a properly grounded faith.
I very much believe that human beings should use their God-given reason, and should never agree to *turn off* their reason because they’re displeased by what it yielded. But I also believe that faith is a gift of grace, and that some mysteries of Christianity are mostly impenetrable to human reason, at least here below.
One has to tell the truth. The right reason to become a Christian is that, having thought about it, one has come to the conclusion that Christianity is true.
There can be a high degree of convergent certainty at these things. How likely is it that the law of gravity is not true, or the 2 + 2 does not equal 4? Just because a belief has a rational basis does not mean that it is fragile or tenuous.
Now, there is a different but related question of how to refute the skeptic. In a certain sense, faith is a necessity not so much for Christianity as for science and common sense. Just because the sun has risen 10,000 times does not logically entail that it will rise tomorrow.
But there need be no particular epistemic discontinuity about believing in Christianity relative to all sorts of everyday beliefs.