Faith fosters ignorance?

THERE is a beautiful psalm that I have learned to pray every Tuesday and which to me is a constant source of great consolation, especially when I try to grapple with the many different painful injustices we meet in life.

This is Psalm 2, which talks about how worldly men and rulers can go against their God who simply laughs at their antics until he metes out to them the justice they deserve.

The opening lines go this way: "Why the tumult among nations, among peoples this useless murmuring? They arise, the kings of the earth, princes plot against the Lord and his Anointed.

"'Come, let us break their fetters, come let us cast off their yoke.' He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord is laughing them to scorn. Then he will speak in his anger, his rage will strike them with terror."

I hope that many discover the tremendous wealth of wisdom contained in the psalms. They to me are the ultimate language of the heart as it plods its difficult way in this world. They engage the heart's deepest longings beautifully and adequately.

As Saint Ambrose once said: "A psalm is a blessing on the lips of the people, a hymn in praise of God, the assembly's homage, a general acclamation, a word that speaks for all, the voice of the Church, a confession of faith in a song."

Truth is, we need to speak to God as intimately as possible. That is, if we have faith -- a divine gift that we can presume to have, since God wants to give it to all, and especially when one receives the sacrament of baptism.

But what do we sometimes have? One recent writer of a letter to the editor voiced out what I consider to be a very sad position in life. Worse, I have reason to believe that what he said reflects the mentality of many, nameless people.

In effect what he said was that faith only fosters ignorance. It stifles our intelligence. It is inhuman, therefore. As such we should reject it.

I was stunned to read it. I very seldom read something that so misrepresents and distorts things as this one. He even cited Saint Thomas Aquinas to support his claim, a tragic classic case of gross misrepresentation.

The writer was simply in a rampage, in some attacking mode; but worse, he was attacking a ghost. He was attacking nothing other than his own misunderstanding about faith.

I have always maintained that rather than undermining our reason and intelligence, our faith enhances, purifies and elevates it to a more spiritual if not supernatural level.

Reason without faith is incomplete. It becomes very vulnerable to many dangerous possibilities. Reason alone cannot be expected to understand many of the mysteries of our world, not to mention those of the supernatural world.

Reason without faith is like handing a small child a big book on geometry for him to learn and master without a teacher.

In fact, reason without faith will unavoidably deny the existence of the spiritual and supernatural realities. It tends to claim that there are not mysteries in this life, which sounds like a raving of a mad man.

It looks funny to me for one to say that with reason alone he can know everything. Not even our faith can claim to enable one to attain such. But let's listen to what the Catechism says about faith and reason.

In the section on "Faith and understanding," covering points numbers 156-159, we have a good discussion on how faith and reason are two ways of knowing things and how they are related to each other.

Faith is different from reason in that it is done not because something proposed is understood, but rather because of the authority of God who reveals it.

But in order to make faith reasonable, "God willed that external proofs of his Revelation should be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit."

"Thus the miracles of Christ and the saints, prophecies, the [Catholic] Church's growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all." (156)

The knowledge derived from faith is also certain, in fact more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. (cfr 157)

But faith also seeks understanding. In fact, it is intrinsic to faith that a believer desires to know better the One in whom he has put his faith, and to understand better what He has revealed. (cfr 158)

There is really no conflict between faith and science because it is same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith in people, and who gives the light of reason on the human mind. (cfr 159)