Activity Can God be Known through Reason Alone?
by
September 27, 2016
source: Jimmy MacBounds
Whether or not God can be known through reason alone is one of the key issues OCR wants you to be able to explore in an essay. These are some quotations from key scholars, the bible, and the Catechism that it would be very useful to refer to in an exam. You don’t necessarily need to quote scholars directly, but you should be able to explain (and critique) their views accurately and in detail:
TASK: Summarise in your own words the point(s) they are making.
| Reason is a valuable tool for understanding God | |
| Natural theology is “the enterprise of providing support for religious beliefs by starting from premises that neither are nor presuppose any religious beliefs.” Alston (Perceiving God, 1991)
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| “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” Catechism of the Catholic Church
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| Reason allows us to understand God because we can see evidence of him in the physical world | |
| “Meditation on [God’s] works enables us, at least to some extent, to admire and reflect on God’s wisdom from reflection upon God’s works…This consideration of God’s works leads to an admiration of God’s sublime power, and consequently inspires reverence for God in human hearts…This consideration also incites human souls to the love of God’s goodness…If the goodness, beauty and wonder of creatures are so delightful to the human mind, the fountainhead of God’s own goodness (compared with the trickles of goodness found in creatures) will draw excited human minds entirely to itself. “ Thomas Aquinas
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| “We have come into this theatre of the world for no other reason than to understand the admirable power, goodness and wisdom of the most excellent creator of all thing, to the extent that this is possible, by contemplating the appearance of the universe and all his actions and individual works, and thus to be swept away more ardently in praise of him” – Jean Bodin, 1539-96, Theatre of the Universe of Nature
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| “We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us…There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without.”
Polkinghorne, a contemporary scientist and theologian
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| “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” Romans 1:20 | |
| “Yet, in the first place, wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness…this skillful ordering of the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible.” Calvin, Institutes (1536)
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| Reason allows us to understand God because we can look within ourselves | |
| “For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone.”
Calvin
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| “There is within the human mind, and that by natural instinct, a sense of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. So that no one might take refuge in the pretext of ignorance. God frequently renews and sometimes increases this awareness, so that all people, recognizing that there is a God and that he is their creator, are condemned by their own testimony because they have failed to worship him and to give their lives to his service … There are innumerable witnesses in heaven and on earth that declare the wonders of his wisdom. Not only those which astronomy, medicine, and all of those natural sciences upon the sight of even the most unlearned and ignorant peoples, so that they cannot even open their eyes without being forced to see them.”
Calvin
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| Accommodation – ‘adjusting or adapting to meet the needs of the situation and the human ability to comprehend it | |
| ‘God condescends and comes down to us, accommodating to our weakness, like a schoolmaster talking a ‘little language’ to his children, or like a father caring for his own children and adopting their ways’ Origen (185-254)
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| “Because our weakness cannot reach God’s height, any description which we conceive of him must be lowered to our capacity in order to be intelligible. And the mode of lowering is to represent him not as he really is, but as we comprehend’…[but also in] ‘a manner as to cause some kind of mirror to reflect the rays of his glory” Calvin
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| Faith and reason are complementary | |
| ‘Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to fullness of truth about themselves….in the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God.’ Philosophy is one of the noblest of human tasks’ which is ‘driven by the desire to discover the ultimate truth of existence….The truth made known to use by Revelation is neither the product not the consumption of an argument devised by human reason’ Pope John II, 1998,
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| “‘Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, can certainly be known by the light of natural human reason from created things: ‘his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made’ (Romans 1:20); nevertheless, it has pleased his wisdom and goodness to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race in another and supernatural way.’ First Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith’ (1870)
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| There is another order of knowledge, which man cannot possible arrive at by his own powers: the order of divine Revelation. Catechism para 50
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| The significance of the Fall of man | |
| ‘I only speak of the primal and simple knowledge to which the very order of nature would have led us if Adam had remained upright (si integer stetisset Adam). In this ruin of mankind no one no experiences God either as Father or as Author of salvation, or favourable in any way, until Christ the mediator comes forward to reconcile him to us Nevertheless, it is one thing to feel that God as our Maker supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, and attends us with all sorts of blessings – and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.’ Calvin
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| Wherever the qualitative distinction between men and the final Omega (i.e. the fundamental difference between man and God that arose as a result of the Fall) is overlooked or misunderstood, that fetishism is bound to appear in which God is experienced in birds and fourfooted things, and finally, or rather primarily, in the likeness of corruptible man – Personality, the Child, the Woman – and in the half-spiritual, half-material creations, exhibitions, and representations of His creative ability – Family, Nation, State, Church, Fatherland,’ Barth
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| Reason is NOT sufficient to allow us to know God | |
| Proverbs 3:5
Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.
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| “Any attempt to ground the truth of God’s Word in human reasoning, however devout and sincere, inevitably leads to theology being subverted by human, historical modes of thought and thus to ‘anthropocentric theology’, the evil against which Barth fought so hard.” Grenz/Olson
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| John’s Gospel 14:6
‘I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me
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| Barth – If one occupies oneself with real theology one can pass by an abyss into which it is inadvisable to step if one does not want to fall.’
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| Wittgenstein – A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have to come believe as a result of such proofs.’
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