Faith and Reason: The Light of Faith

It’s instructive to think about human reason as a kind of light. Light enables our eyes to have access to the world––it illuminates things so that they may be seen by us. Likewise, by the light of reason human beings are able to see/understand that which is intelligible in things.By means of physical light we are able to see physical things in reality (a tree, a dog, a human); by means of the light of reason we are able to see the intelligible natures of things in reality (treeness, dogness, and humanness); the mind has the fundamental and irreducible power to abstract the universal natures of things from particular instances. This is just to say that the human mind has been made to understand that which is intelligible in nature.By the way, this is what makes the human mind unique and utterly distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom; non-human animals lack the light of reason. The light of reason also makes the human mind irreplicable by any machine; no matter how sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes in mimicking certain kinds of human thought processes, it will never be able to attain the ability to reason.So, by the light of reason we come to know that which is intelligible in nature; now, as we’ve seen in an earlier episode in this series, by the same light we can also come to know some things about the source and creator of nature. Although we cannot see God directly by means of the light of reason, we can see him indirectly through his effects; we can reason from the creature to the creator, from the effect to the cause. Of course, what we can know about God through the light of reason is going to be limited.Yet, again as we’ve seen, there is another kind of light that is given to believers; it’s a light by which we can see more clearly the nature of the divine––we can call this the light of faith.