Of course, this disclaimer rests on what I professed in my other disclaimer. I believe that the Catholic Church faithfully proclaims and instructs in God's revelation. I came to this belief through a reasoning process that in itself was liable to error but could approach truth beyond reason by negatives -- ie, discarding the alternatives that had reasonable problems. But of course, faith goes where reason is completely insufficient -- faith can never contradict reason, it fulfills and affirms it, but it can go where reason alone can't go. It's something given, not something we can arrive at through our own capacities. This is all oversimplifying, but I have to move on.
(Skip to the bottom if you just want to get to the point)
That last paragraph somewhat illustrates what I am going to say next. Aquinas says that faith in God's word is surer than reason, because it rests on authority that is completely free from error, and helps reason reach its full potential -- a somewhat difficult thing to understand in our modern context, and I don't have time to try to explain it now. But if you are told something completely beyond your understanding by someone you know is an expert on the subject, you usually are likely to accept it if you have no reason to doubt his credibility. IE you don't see any problem with his integrity and honesty, what he says is not contradictory to what you already know, and so on. We do these acts of belief all the time with things we can't possibly verify ourselves. In fact our whole modern educational system is based on it -- anytime you pick up a textbook you are not being taught to reason (except maybe with math and writing) -- you are being told things to accept that you don't generally have a way to verify by reasoning. You usually presume the accuracy of the textbook unless you have reason not to.
If you know that God exists (and you can come to this basic knowledge through natural reason) then you know that He by definition is ultimate cause and truth. He is much better at communicating and much more reliable than any textbook, newspaper, even well-written book like one of Feynman's on physics.
"Truth is being". Anything, insofar as it IS, is true (a scholastic axiom, and it's quite amazing that it is ever questioned, but it often is, implicitly or explicitly).
But while anything that exists is true insofar as it has real existence, our apprehension is imperfect, so we may have errors mixed up with our understanding of truth. If a human expert told me that the moon is way up beyond the atmosphere, I may trust that he knows what he's saying and that this is True. However, my husband remembers a boy in his first grade class that thought that when he flew in an airplane he flew over the moon. That kid probably believed in the basic statement about the moon being beyond the terran atmosphere but had misconceptions about what atmosphere meant, what air travel is actually about, etc. There were defects in his knowledge and probably added to developmental immaturity it added up to erroneous thinking even though he accepted the basic statement. Feynman calls this "Fragile Knowledge", an elegant term that needed to be put out there.
When we hear truth, and proclaim it simply, as when the first grader simply repeats what his teacher told him, we are not in error in our words though our heads may be full of wrong notions. When we reason, we can be in error, and if we put our thoughts into words our words may err even without a bad intention on our part. Luckily reasoning is a common human endeavor and there are objective ways to tell if someone is reasoning poorly or not. Sometimes by writing something out we realize our own reasoning problems. This is not the post to go into detail, but we probably can all think of ways we know when someone is saying things that don't make sense.
However, our proneness to error doesn't make our attempts to reason valueless. There is value in that boy trying to understand for himself exactly HOW the moon is positioned, not just taking it on trust. Of course, there was more value in my husband's first-grade perspective -- he knew very well the boy was wrong. Basically, humans will reason because it's a primary part of their nature, and it's better to try to improve our reason than to just let it divide itself into what might be called "fideism" -- professing a doctrine or belief while materially falling into erroneous conceptions about it. And though it's not essential to know exactly how the moon is situated, since the moon is contingent and temporal and we can live fine if somewhat ignorantly without knowing the details for sure, it IS crucially important to know very well what is of deepest importance to us -- WHO we are, what is the meaning of our lives, why we are here, what is our destiny. In fact, there is nothing besides these things that really matter except BECAUSE of these things.
A longwinded way of saying -- insofar as I am directly quoting Holy Writ or the Magisterium of the Church without putting my own thinking process on it -- what I say is not erroneous (though of course, some may disagree, which is fine -- I encourage everyone to seek truth for themselves, not in the sense that everyone has their "own truth", but that everyone's search has to be undertaken personally by themselves, with the grace of God, not by proxy).
However! whenever I add my own reflections to the precise proclamation, I am just as likely as any other human to be in error. So I am taking a risk, but I am going to be thinking anyway, so I am trying to think well. Writing helps me think. And sometimes witnessing another's thought processes can help a reader with his or her own -- even by default, as one critically examines the problems with the thinking. In that way, I've gotten benefit from atheistic writings, for example. So reasoning together is a charitable endeavor.
However, I don't want to risk the Church's credibility or put my reader's search for truth at risk, so please make the distinction I just made when you are reading my posts, especially ones that deal with matters of faith:
If I say something that sounds fishy, examine it for yourself. You may have caught me in an error of thinking, and if so, please consider letting me know, but that doesn't reflect on anything but myself. It doesn't reflect on the true witness of the Church, which everyone has to examine for themselves.
