Saturday, September 17, 2016

odd bedfellows?

Lewis tells us something profound about faith and reason today in A Year with C.S. Lewis.

He says that when we doubt, whether we're doubting God or anesthesia, our faith and reason on one hand are battling our emotions and dark imagination on the other.

This is different than what many people typically assume regarding faith and reason. Much of the modern scientific community thinks that faith and reason are antithetical (that means they contradict each other.) But faith and reason have been going hand in hand for millennia.

John Paul II said that faith and reason are like the two wings of the human spirit in which it rises to contemplate truth. While many people inside the church and out think that faith and reason argue with each other, many deep thinkers throughout history have integrated the two, realizing that each is incomplete without the other. Aquinas told us that it is not enough to use science to understand the world around us. That without faith, we only see part of the picture. It's also true that without reason, our faith gives us a somewhat skewed view of reality. We need both.

So let's continue to let our faith inform our reason, and our reason in turn inform our faith. They go hand in hand very readily, once we realize they're not strange bedfellows after all.

God, thank You for speaking to us through both faith and reason.

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