St. Thomas Aquinas, and How His Thinking Informs Modern Life

I'm going to be leading an Adult Faith group again, starting next Wednesday evening. One of the people we will be looking at in our video series is St. Thomas Aquinas. His thinking about the conflict between Church Teaching and Science/Natural Philosophy formed the basis for much of Western Civ.

The dynamics between dogmas of the Church (those teachings held to be authentic and fundamental to the Faith) and Science (which is always open - theoretically - to modification, as data is found that contradicts the previous theories), is one of the big issues of our time. Many moderns use Science as a way of 'proving' that religion and God are hogwash. When faced with contradictory information, moderns choose to dump God, or, at least, organized religion. Many retain some sort of mushy 'spiritual' awareness, without all those yucky rules or structure.

Fr. Michael Barrone, a long-time and very popular defender of the Faith, ruminates on the influence of Aquinas:

Thomas Aquinas saw with utter clarity that since all truth comes from God, there can never be, finally, any conflict between the data of the sciences and the facts of revelation. In his own time, there were advocates of the so-called “double truth theory,” which held that the “truths” of philosophy and science were in one category and the “truths” of the faith in another. On this interpretation, one could hold mutually exclusive positions as long as one remained cognizant that the opposing views were in separate departments of the mind. 

The article is worth reading. Have a good and refreshing Sunday.

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