“The healing of man and culture will ultimately come about through a restoration of the unity between faith and reason”
Brian Jones, a grad student in philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, recently had a wonderful article on the role of philosophy in the New Evangelization up on the Crisis Magazine website . One of the things that attracts me the most about Thomism is that it straight forwardly asserts that there are truths we can know about the world around us. Jones writes that
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the truths man could know are not just the heritage of the philosophers, but of anyone that is born into the human race. Philosophic truths are often based upon what one already knows through his experience of the world around him. One need not be a professional philosopher to discover this. In fact, being a professional philosopher could be detrimental to this realization. The certitude of man’s confidence in knowing the world outside of his own mind, and the confidence that what we know about the external world is actually true, is the great patrimony of perennial philosophy.
Throughout the article Jones argues that faith and reason are distinct and of a ‘different order’ yet indissolubly linked since they proceed from the ‘same source’. This is an important truth and one I think would go a long way in helping to bridge the divide between science and religion and healing the rifts brought about in today’s culture wars. Toward the end Jones has a great line that I wish I had written
The healing of man and culture will ultimately come about through a restoration of the unity between faith and reason.
Read the whole thing here.
