object made intelligible to it,” a state that would require us to be “uplifted out of this
mortal life” (1945, 97).
There are other reasons than mere finitude for thinking that the powers of unaided human
reason might be limited. Immanuel Kant (1965), for example, famously argued that
human theoretical knowledge is always structured by the categories of human
understanding, and by space and time, the “forms of human intuition.” Our theoretical
knowledge is therefore limited to knowledge of the phenomenal world, the world as it
appears to humans, and may not correspond to noumenal reality, reality as it is in itself.
God, for example, is regarded by many theologians as transcending space and time; if so,
God cannot be known by humans through the exercise of their theoretical cognitive
powers.
For both Aquinas and Kant, these cognitive limitations are partially remedied by faith.
For Aquinas, as we have seen, faith includes believing some truths that God has revealed
which we humans would be unable to grasp on our own. For Kant, who famously
concluded that he had found it necessary to “limit knowledge to make room for faith,”
faith is not necessarily limited to belief in a historical revelation. Although Kant does not
deny the possibility of such a revelation or the reasonableness of a believing response to
one, such historical faith for him must be governed by what he terms “pure moral faith,”
a faith in God, human freedom, and life after death that is grounded in the demands of
rational morality (1960, 100–105).
However, even if we grant the theoretical possibility that there are truths about God that
are “above” human reason, is it possible for us humans to recognize our limits? If we
encounter a limit to human reason, would reason have the capacity to recognize this limit,
or would such a capacity to recognize the limit itself be beyond the limit? And even if we
can recognize our limits, does faith really make it possible to transcend those limits in
some way?
There might be various ways in which the limits of human reason could be recognized.
Kant, for example, thought that when reason exceeded its proper boundaries it fell into
antinomies or contradictions (1965, 384–483).^5 A more promising line of thought is that
the limits are revealed to humans by God's self-revelation itself. Just as we might come to
recognize certain human limitations if we encountered an extraterrestrial being who was
vastly superior and lacked those limitations, so also an encounter with a self-revealing
infinite God might help us to understand our own limitations.
How could we recognize such superiority? One might think that this would be
impossible. By hypothesis, such a superior being would know things we humans cannot
know. How, then, could we discern that this superior knowledge is genuine knowledge,
since we cannot independently confirm it?
In the case of the extraterrestrial the answer is reasonably clear. There are a variety of
considerations that might provide evidence for superiority. One factor might be sheer
reliability. If the extraterrestrial communicated truths that we were able to verify
independently, if the claims communicated were invariably true, this would be evidence
of superior cognitive power, especially if the claims concerned issues where a human
knower would typically make some errors. A second factor might be the manner in which
the extraterrestrial's knowledge was obtained. I may know what I had for lunch today, but
if an extraterrestrial knew this who was not present for lunch and had no apparent means
of knowing such a thing, this would be evidence of superiority. Foreknowledge of events
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