REASON AND FAITH FOR SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS AND BLESSED JOHN DUNS SCOTUS
(I) The problem
The question of faith and reason is thought in many cases to be a problem
of consistency among the dictates of reason and those of faith and is
formulated in terms of the reliability of the many ways of justifying true
belief. Thus the qualm `Which is more reliable?' may change into a doubt
and eventually it is asked whether faith justifies knowledge:
Another type of claim to knowledge ... is faith.
The same difficulty that plagued the claims to
knowledge by intuition and revelation occurs
here ... Thus sense experience and reasoning, not
faith, are the basis for the claim of reliability
... Indeed, it seems too obvious to mention that
when people appeal solely to faith as a way of
knowing, they do so because there is no
evidence that what they say is true ... 1
The above explanation taken from the finale of a section discussing the
sources of knowledge in a somehow outdated textbook of philosophical
analysis written in our century is not in essence very far removed from
the debates which had taken place among medieval philosophers after the
twelve hundreds. The former may be more straigtforward in rejecting faith
as knowledge. But the latter too must have comprised strong arguments
against the reliability of faith. Scotus formulates several of these
arguments, which reject the reliability of faith after a cursory
examination, in the first question of the Prologus to the Ordinatio.2 In
the course of ScotusÙ evaluation of the controversy for and against the
reliability of faith not only do we discover the familiar qualms about
faith in comparison to sense-experience and the employment of r ...