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[Eisworth]

Not my usual reading material, I'll admit.

Anyway, I have a soft spot for medieval philosophy because of my own experience of growing up Christian in Louisiana. Why? Mainly because of their tenet that faith and reason were not only compatible, but each was necessary for the other. Growing up, I was never satisfied with the lack of explanation for things that seemed clearly contradictory in the religion I was being taught --- Sunday school teachers would always opt out to the "we just can't understand it with our finite minds, but it makes sense to God".

For the medievals (especially Anselm and Aquinas) this answer was not satisfactory either, and I enjoy their attempts at formulating Christian doctrine in a logically coherent manner. A lot of their work isn't relevant anymore, since they were basing their logic on Aristotelian ideas about how the universe works, but I love that for most part, it DOES work given their background assumptions. They were mathematicians in spirit, working in philosophy and theology, and I can empathize with what they were trying to do.

Anselm is a bit more optimistic than Aquinas, and he wrote quite a bit earlier while most of Aristotle's works were still unknown to the West. He "proves" that God must exist, and deduces most of the standard medieval assumptions about God from a bare list of assumptions. He goes so far as to "prove" that God must be a trinity [God exists, God created the universe, and in order to to this, his mind needs to have "the Word" for creation within it, and once you prove that God and The Word must coincide, you can deduce that they must love each other -- this "Love" is then shown to be the Holy Spirit".] Ok, not everyone's cup of tea, and the arguments don't hold water today, but I still love that he tried to do this.

I believe that it is possible for a rational person to be religious [mathematically, "existence of God" is consistent with reality, but not deducible from it], but rationality shows that the religion most people embrace is incoherent and cannot be logically justified.
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Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University