As we’ve learned previously, our God loves reason and order. He created the universe to be logical and intelligible and to be ruled by him through his divine law manifested in our hearts through the natural law and our society through just civil law. Fortunately for us, this all-powerful and orderly God also lovingly reveals himself to humanity so we can know him, love him, and enjoy eternal happiness with him. He chooses to do so through two books: the Book of Creation and the Book of Scripture.

God reveals himself indirectly through nature. The towering peaks of the Rockies, the surging of Niagara Falls, the migration of Monarch butterflies, the unique contours of each snowflake all demonstrate the beautiful care of our Creator toward his work. In addition, God created us in unique ways to point back to him. We are social by nature and placed in community, pointing back to God himself as a community of Divine Persons. We have a religious instinct that wants to discover the Ultimate Truth and worship something if not Someone. We have an intellect and will, by which we know and love, powers within us that are infinite in scope. While our senses can only take in so much sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, our souls have no limit to what they can know and love. Over time, humanity began to systematize this observable knowledge through the scientific method. This path for measuring and quantifying the elements of the universe is a remarkable gift, but it reaches its natural limit in tangible, observable phenomena. Reason and science cannot and were not designed to get beyond what we can sense to questions of meaning or spiritual realities.

Beyond reason but not contrary to it, God reveals himself directly through Scripture and Tradition. We could never know God as he truly is without his decision to show us. He reveals truths about our common origin, nature, and destiny to us, that we are made in his image to know and love him. God knew that we would struggle to learn the necessary truths for eternal happiness alone (Heck, I struggled with basic physics!), and so he reveals truths of human nature as well so we can know them more easily, certainly, and exactly. Revelation and Reason are not opposing but harmonious since they share one origin in God. Reason provides good foundations for the truths of faith, while faith clarifies and strengthens rational convictions. Faith without Reason is blind and inhuman. Reason without Faith is uncertain, slow,  and error-ridden. It often only asks, ‘Can we do this?’ rather than ‘Should we do this?’



Next week, we’ll explore why the doctrine of Naturalism, the principle that society can be organized without God, fails to achieve the common good it longs for and has inherited from Christian culture. By divorcing God and man, faith and science, revelation and reason, societies set themselves on a dark and lonely path. Let’s find out if there’s a way to start heading back toward the light!

-Fr. Stephen