 Hello and welcome to Tan Academy's High School Curriculum, an introduction to fundamental theology this series evidence of things Unseen my name is Father Carter. I'm a priest of the diocese Charlotte and very happy to be walking with you all as your host throughout this series Humans aren't perfect How's that a line to start with? We easily see imperfection when we look out at the world around us and see the disorder caused by corruption moral depravity and selfishness But when we have a moment to reflect and really take a look at our own heart We can see similar disorder that causes us to fail Men and women created by God and his image and likeness are given what we call higher faculties this means that we do share some of the faculties with animals some similar abilities motion emotion the ability to Procreate memory even imagination to a certain extent But we have abilities that make us higher than the animals that God gave us specifically to help direct our lives Those abilities those higher faculties are our intellect and our will We were created to direct all of our lower faculties our emotions our desires our instincts according to what is true and good But the fall changed that The choice that Adam and Eve made to disobey God made it so that our lower faculties War and struggle against our higher faculties We want what we want when we want it and we don't like when someone gets in our way or tells us no Saint Paul expresses this much to the Romans when he writes I do not do the good I want But the evil I do not want is what I do When we recognize this disorder within us the technical term is concupiscence it's a tendency to sin Then we also have to acknowledge that we need help to master our desires This means that we have to look outside of ourselves for something or someone that can help us bring order to our life When we started looking outside of ourselves for order man saw natural creation We observed patterns cycles repetitions and change that all seem to be predictable and ordered And as powerful as each individual is through to the decisions he makes Some things in nature were beyond his change There had to be something beyond that gave the world order if We look back into the history of beliefs of the pagans It wasn't some invention of someone's imagination All their beliefs are based on seeing and creation something divine Whether it be the Roman gods Mars Venus and Saturn or the Native American deities of the sky god sea god wind god Every culture seemed to be grasping for the being or beings that ordered the patterns of nature This is loosely the basis where st. Thomas Aquinas starts with his five natural proofs Now the st. Thomas's proofs are all well and good from a natural standpoint of reasoning to the fact that a god exists But they can't tell us who god is Some of God's attributes are revealed in creation But it would take a long time for man to reason to those truths on his own On top of all of that there are some things about God that reason can't know on its own When I was in school, I struggled with algebra for a long time I was I was supposed to reason to use reason principles distributive communicative laws in order to find some missing variable and I made mistakes all the time It was very slow at first at solving equations and when I needed help I needed a lot of help and so many times the teacher would have to come alongside me at my desk and Guide me through the right steps so that I would see my mistakes and come finally to the right answer In a similar way natural revelation is not enough man has everything He needs in nature to solve for God if you will the very the God variable But it would take a really long time and with lots of mistakes So much like my teacher had to come next to me at my desk God comes to man in order to reveal himself and who he is in Some of what God reveals to us. We could have come to know naturally Eventually such as God's goodness and his sovereignty But some revelation is about things that we could never figure out through the sole use of our higher faculties Our heads are our reason such as God's trinity of persons So beginning in the Old Testament and culminating in the coming of Christ God leads us to know him He teaches us how to order our lives rightly But even more than this. He shows us that order in our lives Reflects the divine order of God's own life It's very important to recognize that God lovingly chooses to make himself known It's an act of love and mercy that pierces Into history and gives us glimpses of who he is No other religion claims that No other religion outside of Judaism and Christianity proclaims that this radical truth That God lovingly enters into our story to assist us What is more Christ shows his love in a special way by consecrating his apostles and the truth We don't only have scripture and tradition the deposit of faith, but we have a church With the protected authority to teach from these truths of divine revelation So that every generation can understand the gospel message and order their lives accordingly See this beautiful love God didn't want to leave us wandering about in doubt and sin after the fall He teaches us who he is so that we might desire to journey back to him and sense knowing God and his revelation is the inspiration for desiring God There's no reason that any of us would not want to soak up those truths through reading and study That's the first step of ordering our lives rightly and responding to God's love that is coming to know him and his desires for us