Scholars widely recognize Thomas Aquinas as the most authoritative Catholic religious philosopher to connect Christian belief (in particular, the ideas of Augustine the Blessed) with Aristotle's philosophy. It was Thomas Aquinas who formulated the five proofs of God's existence. Recognizing the relative independence of the natural being and human reason, he argued that nature is perfected by grace and reason by faith. Philosophical knowledge and natural theology, based on the analogy of being ( ...