FAITH and PROMISE
According to the church, revealed truth is an unchanging, unchangeable truth given by God to man. This truth constitutes the dogma as expressed in the scripture and handed down by the church. Dogma contains mysteries; acceptance of this dogma defines faith [1] and characterizes believers. It is beyond the reach of human reason alone, and therefore beyond the reach of critics of reason.
Revealed truth can either be used as an argument, or disputed as a claim.
1. Revealed truths as arguments
Revealed truths as found in scripture and in dogmatic writings are basic argumentative resources for believers when it comes to justifying a vision of the world, a way of life, a course of action, and so on.
These arguments are themselves grounded in other creeds that belong to the same corpus of revealed beliefs: we follow the Divine Law because our God gave it to us; because He promised to reward His followers, those who obey His rule, those who do the good, and to punish the wicked who do the bad.
Appeals to religious belief can be dismissed as appeals to superstition, see Threat and promise.
2. Revealed truths as claims
The possible opposition between revealed truth and demonstated truth can motivate the total rejection of reason and argument. Thomas Aquinas (1225 –1274) discusses “whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?” and quotes St. Ambrose’s (~340 – 397) categorically negative answer: “Put aside argument where faith is sought” (ST, Part 1, Quest.1, Art. 8) [2].
For a believer, revealed truths take precedence over all other forms of truth; to try to prove a revealed truth would be to degrade it. It should be emphasized that, for a believer, renouncing argument does not mean submitting to the argument from authority, since he considers authority to be of human origin, while faith is of divine origin. Whether religious tradition is of human or divine origin is a matter of controversy among theologians.
But the primacy of faith does not negate the need for argument to strengthen the faith of the believer or to persuade the unfaithful to the faith. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes three types of situations, depending on whether one is addressing Christians, heretics, or unbelievers.
— When a religious speaker addresses a Christian audience, argument has two important uses. The first use is to connect two articles of faith, to show that one can be logically deduced from the other. For example, if you believe in the resurrection of Christ, then you must believe in the resurrection of the dead. In addition, arguments can be used to expand the realm of faith to include deeper truths, derived from the elementary ones.
— When arguing with heretics who agree on some point of the dogma, an argument is built on that point to show that they must also accept the validity of other related points.
The technique is basically the same as in the previous case. In both cases, the deductions are based on the systemic argument, which assumes that the sacred text has all the characteristics of a code.
— When confronting unbelievers, the argument is essentially ad hominem, showing that their beliefs are contradictory (after Trottman 1999, pp. 148-151). [3]
As can be seen, the Angelic Doctor does not exclude situations of deep disagreement from the field of argumentation.
3. Superstition
[1] Latin ad fidem argument, fides, “faith”.
[2] Quoted from Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica. Benziger Brothers, 1947. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP001.html#FPQ1OUTP1 (11-08-2017)
[3] This was the situation in the 13th century. In the 16th century, the evangelization of the American Indians, after the Spanish conquest was quite different. See Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Los diálogos de 1524.Edición facsimilar, introducción, paleografía. Versión del nahuatl y notas de Miguel León-Portilla. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 1986.