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 wh ...