Before and After Christianity

Before and after the rise of Christianity, philosophers depended largely on developing axioms and using them to draw conclusions about the world. Before Christianity, the axioms were typically based on what was apparent to human reason. After Christianity became widespread, thinkers had to contend with a new source of knowledge- one based on faith rather than on what appeared self-evident to the human mind.

Early Christians justified their dependence on faith in different ways. Some embraced fideism and favored faith even without or over reason. Others engaged and melded their new traditions with older ones. Thomas Aquinas describes and responds to several challenges of Christianity. Aquinas asserts that the study of God as revealed in Christianity, which he calls Sacred Doctrine, is a science which begins with divine revelations as axioms and uses human reason to build a meaningful body of information concerning who God is and how humans should behave.

Aquinas goes on to answer that challenge that, if philosophy based on Christianity is a science, it is a lesser science because it is less certain of its conclusions, having accepted them on faith. Aquinas responds to this argument in two parts. First, he argues that God’s revelation is more certain then what seems self-evident to humans because God, unlike humans, is omniscient. The only reason it seems less certain is because fully comprehending God’s level of certainty is beyond human abilities.

Aquinas’s second response is that Sacred Doctrine deals with more important subject matter then other sciences and is therefore more important. All other sciences, he argues, indirectly seek the same goal, eternal blessedness, that sacred doctrine seeks directly. It is worth nothing...

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... by assuming that because he experienced the idea of perfection that God must exist. Nonetheless, Descartes was able to provide evidence, if not proof, that God exists and is responsible for the clear and correct aspects of human reasoning.

The rise of Christianity raised questions on how this new mode of thinking, based on faith, could fit and interact with a world that had not based its thinking on faith but instead on human reason. While some rejected that the new and old modes of thinking were compatible, others sought and found ways to reconcile both ways of exploring the world. The traditional philosophical method of starting with assumptions that cannot be proven but are assumed to be true and progressing to conclusions based on those assumptions was applied by both Aquinas and Descartes to address the mutual challenge posed by Christianity and philosophy.