Would it be reasonable to believe someone who tells you that he has received a divine revelation
that there is an alien spacecraft hiding behind an approaching comet, coming to destroy the earth?
What about the Christian claim that Jesus is God incarnate,
who worked miracles like making the blind to see, the lame to walk, and even raising the dead?
Is there a difference between these claims?
Is it ever reasonable to believe in claims of divine revelation or appeals to divine authority?
When Thomas Aquinas asks about the reasonableness of religious faith,
he steers a course between two extremes. One extreme exalts the greatness of Christian
belief by asserting that our assent to the truth of Christianity depends on
supernatural faith alone, and that faith alone gives us reliable knowledge of God.
On this view, trying to give rational philosophical arguments for Christian belief
is a mistake, because it would mean using natural criteria to judge supernatural truth.
The other extreme claims that natural reason is enough to give us adequate knowledge of Christian
truth. Given credible signs that Christianity comes from God, the natural power of human reason
is fully competent to assent rationally to the truths that Christianity proposes.
Aquinas corrects these extreme positions, and steers a middle course between them.
He would agree that supernatural faith is a free gift that gives us access to the
mystery of God in himself, in a way that surpasses what natural reason can know.
Yet Aquinas would also say that we should not naively believe everyone who claims to
receive a divine revelation. Such claims are not all equal or equally reasonable.
We should use our minds endowed with reason to examine the credibility of such claims.
To put it in another way, philosophy and the historical study of religion
should play a role in our discernments about truth claims of various competing religious traditions.
When we use all our natural powers to examine the claim that there is an alien spacecraft
coming to destroy the earth, we would conclude that there is very little credibility to it,
and there is little reason to believe it. In contrast, there are in fact very good
reasons for believing that God has revealed himself in Christ -- that is, that the Christian
faith is uniquely reasonable and believable. Aquinas’s middle position holds that God gives
us the grace of supernatural faith in the truth of Christianity, AND ALSO provides us with signs
of credibility or indications of warranted belief. The signs don’t procure the faith
but they indicate it outwardly, as it were, the truth of the faith, so that one can see that there
is something reasonable about believing that God is at work in the mystery of Christianity.
So we need faith to know the inner mystery of God, AND believing those
things is a reasonable thing to do. What are these signs or indications
given to reason to help assure us of the truth of Christianity, according to Aquinas?
Here he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual aids.
The first are what he calls preambles of the faith or praeambula fidei. These are
things that can be known by the light of human reason, for example, by philosophical inquiry.
In principle, we can know them by our natural powers, but in practice, it is like climbing
a mountain: it is difficult to do and few of us manage to do it on our own. Without God’s help,
humanity in its fragile and often errant state can easily forget these truths or
fail to discover and promote them. That’s why God also reveals many of these truths in scripture.
The Catholic Church safeguards and promotes these teachings not to suppress natural philosophical
reasoning but to stimulate it. Such truths include that God exists as the transcendent Creator,
beginning and end of all things, that God is one and good, and that God exerts a providence over
all things -- and many other truths about human beings and about the morality of human actions.
A second category is what Aquinas calls “reasons of credibility”:
these are effects of God’s activity that transcend nature but that leave clear, discernible marks of
their truth perceptible to human reason. Examples include the moral perfection of the Saints,
and the longstanding persistence and consistency of the Catholic Church as an institution,
as well as the antiquity and survival of the Jewish people.
The most famous example of reasons for credibility, however, are miracles.
According to Aquinas, miracles are not the source of faith, but rather are signs
to those who receive the grace of faith that the faith is reasonable to consent to.
So they are important in their own way but the visible miraculous effects or
signs are not themselves the center or essence of the Christian religion.
What is the center are the mysteries of the faith, like the Trinity or the Incarnation.
Miracles accompany the Triune God’s self-revelation in Christ and in the Church. They
point us toward the reasonableness of believing that Christ’s teaching is of divine origin.
Aquinas says that miracles are of different kinds. The greatest miracles are things accomplished by
God that nature could never do -- for example, that Jesus enters the upper room on Easter Sunday
evening in his physical body even though the doors were shut and locked. A human
body cannot naturally do this, but God’s power makes it possible in this case.
God also sometimes works miracles that are consistent with the order of nature,
like miraculously restoring a paralyzed man’s ability to move -- it is natural for a man’s body
to be able to move, but in this case, his nature is healed by a supernatural power from above.
Another case would be the miracle of causing the wind to cease. That would
have been brought about by a natural cause, but Jesus calms the storm by a word of his command.
Miracles never involve a philosophical contradiction -- for example,
that something would both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.
In a sense, then, miracles may transcend the power and capabilities of nature, but they
are neither irrational nor contrary to nature. Some people object that miracles must violate
the laws of nature. This is typically based on an idea of David Hume, who argued that
a miracle is an act against the laws of nature that purportedly stems from a deity.
The presupposition seems to be that the ordinary laws of nature studied by
scientific observations are trustworthy, and that it is irrational to appeal to
a god or gods who disrupt the laws of nature. However, as Aquinas notes, the order of nature
is itself an indirect but real testimony to the reality of God, who creates all things with a deep
order inscribed in them, in accord with their intrinsic natural inclinations or movements.
Consequently, what we often call the laws of nature are themselves
indirect but real witnesses to God who is their source and their ultimate explanation. As the
Creator of the world and of every created nature and every natural law, God is omnipresent and
omnipotent. He can accomplish things that surpass the powers of the natures he has made -- that is,
he can perform miracles in the world -- whenever he decides in his wisdom to do so.
And it is reasonable for God to reveal his presence selectively through miracles because
they signal the truth of his divine revelation. However, revelation provides us with knowledge
of something greater than any miracle, the mystery of God in himself, the Holy Trinity.
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