Fr. Gregory Pine

just call everything into doubt and then see what you can do on the basis of your subjective experience.

And then the idea that things which people claim to be certain of can be a source of, you know, violence, oppression, et cetera, whether those claims are adjudicated in good faith or whether that's just used as ammunition as a way by which to rule out difficult claims that have purchase on my life, which caused me to convert, you know, we can talk about that all day.

and all night with all three people who care about who Thomas Aquinas is.

But yeah, I think that in the 16th and 17th century, you see the breakup of a kind of consensus.

And, you know, people blame that on science.

I don't think it's to be blamed on science.

Obviously, like the medievals had an appreciation for how science was to be conducted.

Their approach, their kind of methodology relied heavily on demonstration so that you could advance with certainty.

You make the empirical judgments and then you say, okay, let's ground this on the basis of what we know.

But yeah, I think that we're still in the, whatever, aftermath, in the ruins of a kind of post-apocalyptic wreck

that was visited upon us by 17th century folks.

So I'd say there are also...

salvation historical reasons for which we find it difficult to be certain and confident.

Like we're all laboring under the burden of sin.

So we come into this world despoiled of grace and wounded in our nature.

And so we're just thinking through things under the cloud of ignorance.

We're choosing through things with this kind of

I don't know what you would call like a knot of malice.

And then we're feeling through things with a healthy dose of like concupiscence and weakness mixed in.

So it's just hard to navigate life in that respect.