Present Issues that affect our Home

- Pollution and Climate Change

- Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health
hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths.
- Causes: transport, industrial fumes, substances that contribute to the
acidification of soil and water, fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and
agro toxins (pesticides) in general.
- Pollution as an effect of humanity’s throwaway culture
- Causes: pollution produced by residue, garbages, including dangerous waste
present in our surroundings.
- The Issue of Water
- One particularly serious problem is the quality of water available to the poor.
Every day, unsafe water results in many deaths and the spread of water-related
diseases.
- Limited access to water is linked to inadequate hygiene. It causes premature
death of many infants.
- Underground water sources in many places are threatened by the pollution
produced in certain mining, farming, and industrial activities, especially in
countries lacking adequate regulations or controls.
- Detergents and chemical products, commonly used in many places of the world,
continue to pour into our rivers, lakes, and seas.
- Loss of Biodiversity
- The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species that may
constitute extremely important resources in the future, not only for food but also
for curing disease and other uses. Different species contain genes that could be
key resources in years ahead for meeting human needs and regulating
environmental problems.
- The decline in the Quality of Human Life and the Breakdown of Society
- Human beings too are creatures of this world, enjoying a right to life and
happiness, and endowed with unique dignity. So we cannot fail to consider the
effects on people’s lives of environmental deterioration, current models of
development, and the throwaway culture.

Faith and Reason

Reason and Faith are compatible with one another as are Science and Religion because there is
but one truth. Basic religious beliefs are compatible with reason. There are rational supports
for those beliefs. Other beliefs may be strictly matters of faith resting upon the basic beliefs.

Faith
- It involves a stance toward some claim that is not, at least presently, demonstrable by
reason.
- Faith is a kind of attitude of trust or assent.
- As such, faith is ordinarily understood to involve an act of will or a commitment on the
part of the believer.
- Faith is man's obedient response to God's revelation.
- Faith is a kind of attitude of trust or assent.
- It involves an act of will or a commitment on the part of the believer.

Two Types of Faith:

a.) Evidence-Sensitive
- Faith as closely coordinated with demonstrable truths
- Evidence garnered from the testimony and works of other believers,
b.) Evidence-Insensitive
- Act of the will of the religious believer alone.
- “I’m just doing what the other ones are doing”

Reason
- It's generally understood as the principles for a methodological inquiry, whether,
intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or religious.
- Man can know that God exists by reflecting on creation. "From the greatness and
beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator" ( Wis. 13:
5, cf., Rom. 1: 20).
- Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the
contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the
truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and
women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves - Pope John Paul II
- “If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as the Creator of all, it is
not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their
sinfulness place an impediment in the way.” - St. Paul

Reason supports faith and philosophy supports theology in the following ways:
 1. Reason Prepares the way to faith.
- St. Clement of Alexandria called Philosophy a “stepping stone to the faith”. From
Reason to Faith, Reason can show that there is a God and can demonstrate his primary
attributes such as his power and divinity.
2. Reason can show that there is a God and can demonstrate his primary attributes
such as his power and divinity.
- The reason lays the foundation for faith and makes the revelation “credible”. The reason
is thus the common ground between believers and unbelievers.
3. Faith without Reason withers into myth or superstition, it loses its universality.
- “Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies.” - Mahatma
Gandhi
- Deprived of reason, faith is left with only feel and experience. It loses its universality.
4. Philosophy provides a language for theology.
- Its concepts and patterns of thought permit theology to have a logical structure and to
be a true science.

Philosophy vs Religion

- Philosophy means the “love of knowledge”, it’s down to earth meaning dealing with
things on the earth or thoughts in where they come from, the way we think, and what is
good vs bad (without a deity telling us so). Powered by the logical curiosity of
knowledge, human, and others understand the earth and use that knowledge to
determine the best ways to behave, act, and live. Philosophy is guided by logic.
There can be philosophy in religions, just no religion in philosophy.
- Religion means “state of life bound to monastic rules” or “conducting indication a
belief in a divine power”, it is something people believe in and follow, just like
philosophy but it isn't down to earth, it is above us, something not visible but powered
by belief. It is a belief in some kind of deity that wants us to behave, act, and live, in a
ascertain way. Religion is guided by belief.
- Philosophy is questions that may never be answered while Religion is answers that
must never be questioned.
- Philosophy is a bigger domain of discipline that tackles many concepts like
metaphysics, the search for the ultimate truth, knowledge, and life itself.
- Religion is composed of a set of morals, rules, principles, and ethics that serve to guide
one’s way of living.
 PHILOSOPHY RELIGION

- is a DOCTRINE; it is a system of knowledge; a - is not basically a doctrine but an EVENT; an

science experience with the DIVINE

ORIGIN

- Natural inclination of man to know the truth; - begins from man’s desire to be saved
curiosity and wonder

END

Contemplation of the truth Communion of the Divine

INSTRUMENT

Reason Faith

LANGUAGE

Concepts Symbols

CERTAINTY

It accepts what is reasonable or logical (logical In matters of faith, just have faith. Ex. Abraham:
certainty). What is not logical is rejected. “You shall not kill” yet offered his son to
God.(Certainty with ambiguity)

AGGRUPATIONS

Experts in Philosophy are called teachers, Experts of Religion are called saints. And they
professors, and doctors. And they group group themselves into communities.
themselves into a school of thought.

Four Chief Characteristics of the Bodily World and of Individual Bodies in the World:
a. Composition
i. Entitative
1. 'that which makes a thing what it is’' it is the consideration of something
as pure entity (i.e. the mental abstraction from attendant circumstances)
ii. Essential
1. the union of elements necessary for the constitution of an essence
iii. Accidental
1. Accident is being existing in another as its subject. ex. ‘laptop’ is a
substance because it exists in itself; ‘black’ is an accident, because it does
not exist without a substance (laptop) in which it inheres
iv. Integral
 1. one may lost certain members or powers which normally and naturally
belong to his/her essence, and which bring to that essence a certain
rounded perfection when they are joined or compounded with it.
v. Numerical
1. Crowd as composed of persons ('taken individually are complete in
themselves’)
b. Mutability or changeability
- The infant is in potentiality with respect to adulthood. (The baby is potentially a
grown-up.) The infant is actually an infant (while potentially it is an adult).

c. Contingency
- Contingent beings are caused beings. Beings that does not require existence,
does not, by its own nature, demand existence. It is a thing that CAN exist.
- Generation and corruption continuously bring new substances into existence
and takes other substances out of it. Substances have their exits and their
entrances.
- Any reality that might not be here, would not be here if existence had not been
bestowed upon it by something other than itself.
d. Limitation or finiteness
- The world is filled with many individual things, one of which is not the other,
and each of which is manifestly bounded and limited within the extent of its
own capacity.

The Gospel of Creation

- “… Science and religion, with their distinctive approaches to understanding reality” -

#62 Laudato Si
- “Given the complexity of the ecological crisis and its multiple causes, we need to realize
that the solutions will not emerge from just one way of interpreting and transforming
reality.” (LS No. 63)
- “If the simple fact of being human moves people to care for the environment of which
they are a part, Christians in their turn “realize that their responsibility within creation,
and their duty towards nature and the Creator, are an essential part of their faith.” (LS
No. 64)
- Our role is to 'Till and Keep' the garden of the world.
- Tilling: Cultivating, Working, Ploughing
- Keeping: Caring, Protecting, Overseeing, Preserving
The Wisdom of the Biblical Accounts
 - The first account of creation teaches us that 'human beings play a very important role
in the creation of God'.
- It teaches us that every man and woman is created out of love and made in God's
image and likeness (Gen 1:26).
- It only shows the immense dignity of each person, 'who is not just something, but
someone'. (LS No. 65)
- Man is capable of self-knowledge, self-possession and of freely giving himself &
entering into communion with other persons” (LS no. 65)
- “God rejects every claim to absolute ownership: 'The land shall not be sold in
perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me' (Lev
25:23)

The Mystery of the Universe

- Mystery is that which awaits disclosure or interpretation; something which can never be
known unless revealed by God.

To understand this better, the Pope distinguishes nature and creation:

- It is a system that can be studied, understood, and controlled. Nature is usually seen as
a system that can be studied, understood, and controlled. (LS No. 76)
- It is a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by
the love which calls us together into universal communion. Creation can be understood
as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by
the love which calls us together into universal communion. (LS No. 76)