Religious revelation is a life lived in purposive relationship to the supreme value when that supreme value is not passively waited for but actively pursues the human consciousness, breaking in and reorienting it; this differs from Platonic contemplation where the good dumbly waits to be found.

The modern physical sciences became possible because Christianity established two conditions: (1) the world is not divine, so it can be experimented on and analyzed objectively; (2) the world is radically intelligible in every part, derived from an intelligent source, so science can assume an orderly universe.

The problem is not scientism per se but scientism—the elevation of physical science to the supreme position among all forms of knowledge, when properly it should be subordinate to philosophy and theology, which deal with ultimate meaning and the summum bonum.

A participative view of being holds that the world is in God and reflects God, rather than God being one supreme being among others; this participatory ontology (found in Aquinas, not as 'en sumum' but as 'ipsum esse' or being itself) is what is lost in nominalism and Scotist univocity.

Cardinal George taught that philosophy is a rational path distinct from science; the confusion of rationality with scientific method is a modern error; many people think the only rational path is scientific, but rationality includes philosophical and theological reasoning; this opens the possibility of thinking of religion as rational without being scientific.