When the church recovered the works of Aristotle in the 1100s there was a sorting out process. One of the dangers was an over-reliance on the good and needed tool of logic to deduce truth.
"The danger of Aristotle was in his method. It was bad enough that several of his conclusions contradicted revealed theology, but the problem went deeper than that. Because he had tried to generate results deductively, Aristotle made them seem logically necessary. His admirers did not just claim that he was right; they said he had to be right. God himself was bound by what Aristotle thought because medieval theologians agreed that, though omnipotent, even the Deity could not defy logic. But in reality, most of Aristotle's natural philosophy was wrong."
James Hannam, "Modern Science's Christian Sources," First Things, Oct 2011, 49-50
No comments:
Post a Comment