Why did St. Thomas Aquinas believe faith and reason cannot contradict each other?

St. Thomas Aquinas believed that faith and reason cannot contradict each other because he viewed both as distinct but harmonious paths to truth, originating from the same divine source.12

For Aquinas, reason relies on the natural light of human intellect to understand the physical world, while faith involves the voluntary acceptance of truths revealed by God. Because he maintained that God is the author of both the natural order and divine revelation, he argued that there could be no fundamental conflict between the two.231

Aquinas held that:
* Complementarity: Revelation supplements rather than replaces the findings of sound philosophy.3
* Autonomy: Reason operates according to its own laws and can establish certain truths, such as the existence of God, independently of faith.23
* Consistency: When a contradiction appears to arise, it is often due to an error in human reasoning or a misunderstanding of the natural world, rather than an inherent clash between faith and truth.1

By integrating Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, Aquinas sought to demonstrate that a rational understanding of nature actually supports and deepens one's religious faith.124