I briefly mentioned the Catholic Scholastic movement in the last post, but this new way of thinking is rooted more in Aristotle’s logic than in Plato’s dualistic model. Aristotle studied with Plato in Athens, but he rejected the dualistic model, focusing on reason’s logic as the way we find truth. The Scholastic movement began early in the eleventh century; however, it gained its greatest influence under the Italian Dominican friar and priest, Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century. Aquinas elevated the Scholastic foundational belief that God created nature and that nature is good, not dirty or evil, as the dualists had believed for the previous seven hundred years. Aquinas elevated nature to be equal to Scripture, calling each a book of God from which we learn about God and truth. He also elevated human reason back to its God-given place for finding truth. In his final conclusion, he wrote that you could find and have a relationship with God with reason alone, because reason is divine. However, he admitted that to know some of the mysteries of God, such as the relationship of the Trinity, you need divine inspiration.

You cannot overestimate the impact that Aquinas had on European culture. Without him and his ideas, we might still be stuck in the dualism of the late Roman and Medieval periods. Yet, he may have single-handedly ushered in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. I want to focus on those two movements in future posts. I’m in the hospital for most of the day tomorrow for infusions, and then early Tuesday morning I leave for a very busy trip to Minnesota, so I may not have time to write for several days.

I wish that I could say that Aquinas and the Scholastics reset the balance for Western civilization and life got better and better, but it didn’t. While our culture basked in the good progress of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment for over two hundred years, it did not last before it returned to the oppressive views of the previous periods. I will explain how that happened.

But to be clear, people like me, who appreciate science and respect human reason, would have been welcomed in the Catholic Scholastic Church or the churches of Aquinas; we would even be welcomed in many churches before 1960; however, we are not welcomed in any church today. Not in the conservative church and not in the progressive church like mine. I have told this story many times, but if you are new, in my last church I was declared, in front of the whole church, not to be a real Christian because I opposed forcing our teens into believing in a six-thousand-year-old Earth.

In my present church, which is welcoming to most, I was forced out of a small group when I came out as someone for whom I, like Aquinas, see reason as a gift of God. Within minutes of that, I received an e-mail from one of the leaders explaining to me that I was seriously sick, spiritually, and needed to follow his post-modernist guru to be fixed. I knew that I was not welcome there. But to be fair, two other group members reached out appropriately to say that, while they were confused by my statement (assuming that all of Christianity was opposed to reason), they were curious about my viewpoints.

Two years ago, I attempted to teach a Sunday School class at my church featuring a renowned scientist who became a Christian after observing some remarkable things through science about nature. The only feedback I got from that class was a man waiting outside to sucker punch me in the gut, verbally, telling me how awful the class was because, “no one finds God, never through science; God finds us.” I threw up my hands at making any attempt to try and fit into my own church’s culture.

But I still write here, mostly for the millions (worldwide) for whom the present form of irrational Christianity is out of reach and not welcoming to them. Religion is always about conformity. But I am here to be a voice for them, the exceptions, the enlightened.

I will write more about this later, but I agree with Aquinas that human reason is the way God has created us and our world, as the main way of finding truth. When you reject reason, as our society has now done, then you end up believing the absurd and culture eventually fails. We are living in such precarious times now, not just in the religious world, but in the world in general.

If there is a God, that God lives in reality, a place of factual truths, not lies, not superstitions. Not in conspiracy theories or with confirmation bias. The God I know loves the doubter, the searcher, the critical thinker.

With Respect,

Mike