Q. Your Church insists that, through "natural theology," we can know certain things about God — by reason alone. But all Aquinas’s arguments leave me cold. All they point to is an abstract Chain of Being that starts with an utterly perfect, 24-karat link that gradually peters out into 18-karat, then 14-karat; and finally tarnished, electroplated jewelry you get at a mall on the Jersey shore — “fallen” man. Can we know any more about “God” than that?
Yes, but we needed Him to tell us Himself. That’s where we move from natural to dogmatic theology. Nowadays it’s considered more presentable to call it “systematic” instead of “dogmatic,” since modernity is big on systems but sniffs at dogmas. Here we move from reason to revelation — without, of course, switching off that part of our brains that sorts and measures assertions against each other and the world. When we speak of God as mysterious, we don’t mean that He’s a muddle. If someone presents us with an assertion about God’s nature, and backs it up with snippets of Scripture, it’s our job to measure it first against all the other things we know about God (through reason alone, or because He told us).
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