146. Faith and certainty
146. FAITH AND CERTAINTY
Isn’t faith less certain than science?
On the contrary, the Apostle says (1 Thess. 2:15): When you had received of us the word . . . you received it not as the word of men but, as it is indeed, the word of God. Now nothing is more certain than the word of God. Therefore science is not more certain than faith, nor is anything else. . . .
A thing which has a more certain cause is itself more certain. In this way faith is more certain than these three (intellectual) virtues (wisdom, science, and understanding) because it is founded on the divine truth whereas the aforesaid three virtues are based on human reason.
Secondly, certitude may be considered on the part of the subject, and thus the more a man’s intellect lays hold of a thing, the more certain it is. In this way faith is less certain because matters of faith are above the human intellect, whereas the objects of the aforesaid virtues are not (II-II,4,8).
Many terms have changed their meaning from pre-modern to modern times; and the most common kind of change has been from the older, more objective sense to a more subjective sense. For instance, “want” used to mean “need”, as in “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Now “need” often means “want,” as in “sexual needs”. (No one has “sexual needs”, only sexual wants, or desires. Many people live quite complete, healthy, happy, and holy human lives without sexual activity, although this is often as incomprehensible to typically modern minds as it was to pre-modern minds how people could possibly live without God.)
One such term is the word “certain”, or “certainty”. It used to mean something objective: the determination to a specific nature or end, as “triangles are certain to have 180 degrees” or “God exists certainly, i.e., necessarily rather than contingently”, or “puppies are certain to become dogs, not cats.” Its opposite was randomness or unpredictability. Today “certainty” almost always means something subjective, something predicated not of an objective fact (such as the three examples above) but of a person. In modern usage, “I” am certain that x is y, rather than x itself being certain to be y; so that if you know no geometry, you are not certain that all triangles have 180 degrees.
St. Thomas uses the older, objective sense of “certain” when he says that “nothing is more certain than the word of God”—even though many people doubt or disbelieve it. The revealed Faith is the most certain truth knowable, for any man can be deceived or deceive, but God never can.
Thus science is not more certain than faith even though there is no demonstration of the truths of the Faith by the scientific method, as there is of the truths of science.
St. Thomas also admits a second meaning of certitude, “on the part of the subject,” i.e., as appearing to a given human intellect; and “in this way faith is less certain.” But that concerns appearance (which is relative to a fallible human mind) rather than reality (which is not).
It matters enormously which of these two senses of “certainty” is prior. If we measure the certainty of the Faith by that of our faith, we are modernists, and we view any claim voiced by any human being to have absolute certainty about any of the doctrines of the Faith as something arrogant, narrow-minded, “fundamentalistic”, and thoughtless. If, on the other hand, we measure our own certainty, open as it always is to doubts and misunderstandings, by the certainty of the Faith revealed by God, then it is the most reasonable thing in the world to claim absolute and indubitable certainty even for dogmas like the Trinity that can in no way be proved by any method of human reasoning.
If our faith rests on God’s veracity, it has an absolute and eternally unshakable foundation. If it rests on our own mind, it is as secure as sand. Does your faith look like a castle or a sand castle?