Blog #3

Mason Jenkins

Mrs. Wilhelmus

AP English Language

28 July 2013

Religion and Reason

            Before Aquinas and St. Augustine, reason and religion have always avoided each other.  You either believed in faith and your religion, or only thought through scientific reasoning.  Everything changed once the two medieval thinkers began to Christianize, or interpret Plato and Aristotle’s thoughts through Christianity so reason and faith can collaborate. 

            It was hard for people to think that religion and reason could ever come together and not contradict each other.  For example, in Sophie’s World, Sophie had trouble understanding how Plato’s thoughts, like eternal ideas and how the world was made, could go along with Christianity.  Alberto Knox explains that St. Augustine thought that “God did create the world from the void” as it says in the Bible, but the ideas were there first, by philosophical thought.  When people heard what St. Augustine and Aquinas had to say, they began to think in different ways and understood how Christianity and reason could work together. 

They also believed that philosophy would begin to diminish with the start and rise of Christianity and those beliefs.  With the help of Aquinas and St. Augustine, philosophy could continue to expand without threatening Christianity. 

St. Augustine and Aquinas were able to prove that faith and reason could go hand in hand by combining the thoughts and ideas of Plato and Aristotle with the Bible and the Christian faith.  This led to the acceptance of philosophy joining Christianity and the continuation of philosophy.