Question

Read this excerpt below from G. K. Chesterton's "The Permanent Philosophy." Then, explain how St. Thomas Aquinas reconciles faith and reason based on this excerpt. Your answer should be at least 150 words.
St. Thomas says, quite straightforwardly, that he himself believes this world has a beginning and end; because such seems to be the teaching of the Church; the validity of which mystical message to mankind he defends elsewhere with dozens of quite different arguments. ....But Aquinas says he sees no particular reason, in reason, why this world should not be a world without end; or even without beginning. And he is quite certain that, if it were entirely without end or beginning, there would still be exactly the same logical need of a Creator. Anybody who does not see that, he gently implies, does not really understand what is meant by a Creator. ("The Permanent Philosophy"; p. 9)

Answer 1

According to the analysis that G.K. Chesterton makes in his book "The Permanent Philosophy", about the philosophical ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the principal and best known characteristics of his philosophy was the idea that the mind was meant to know the world outside, expand outwards and gather all possible ideas and information from what it outside of man himself. He believes that belief itself comes from what is seen and touched, from the outside world, more than just the inner reflections within the human mind. In this particular excerpt, St. Thomas is reconciling the ideas put forth by faith and by logic and that at first would seem unreconcilable. On the one hand, there is faith, the faith in what the Church teaches about the world having a beginning and an end, and the sense of a Creator, who cannot be seen but only known through His creations. To Aquinas, there is no dispute of this belief taught by the Church, simply because it is the Church that teaches it. That is his faith. Moreover, to him, regardless of whether the world has a beginning and an end, or not, it would have need of a Creator from whom it all came to be, because things cannot simply spring from nothing. But for those who base their lives in only logic, there is no logical reason to believe that the world was created and will end or that there is a Creator. But Aquinas simply says that the ideas of a world with beginning and end, and of a Creator, cannot be disproven by those who do not believe and reason itself does not provide evidence that the Church´s teachings are wrong, which logically leads to know that unless proven that these ideas are wrong, they must be logically right.  

Answer 2

Thomas Aquinas claims that the world has a beginning and an end because The Church has built it in this way. This is a matter of faith. However, Aquinas puts the focus on the image of God even if people question his idea. If there are people who think the world  does not have a beginning or an end, this idea will not be enough to question the presence of God. The world , in that case, will have a new order and this new order will be definitely designed by God. This means that any order  the world may have it will always be in the hands of the Creator. Faith is reconciled with reason  because a person who does not believe in God and questions the order of any world, that person will have to accept that reason cannot explain what God has constructed. For example, a Mathematician  will  work hard to understand the world of numbers but he/ she will not be able to explain the  origin  of the world of numbers. Can the mathematician get the answer to who has given the numerical word an order?