Faith and reason

It's sometimes said that believers have given up on reason and good sense: 'it's all based on superstition or fear'. In fact, having faith depends on reason and good sense: believers could not recognise or accept propositions of faith (eg 'God became man') without some minimum intellectual grasp of what they mean, or without the context of some pre-existing information into which the proposition fits & from which it gets its sense.

One effect of the Fall and of Original Sin is that reason is wounded and unreliable, thus we need God's gift of faith if we are to have any certainty in this life. However, if we ignored reason altogether, faith would tend towards unguided feeling, intuition and, perhaps, moral wrongdoing. Similarly, without faith, reason would tend towards self-interest, fads and fashions, and short-term options. It's worth recalling that Catholic thinkers have made an outstanding contribution to Western and global intellectual life. It's also worth recalling that the hope of heaven is the hope of a perfect intellectual grasp of God - on this all the other delights of heaven depend.