“Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, argued not only that our empirical inquiries are fallible, due to the fact that they treat objects that are finite and always changing, but our theological inquiry is also subject to continued scrutiny, because, though our “object of study” is unchanging, our finite minds cannot grasp the infinite reality of God. Thus, we have to constantly rethink our traditional ideas of God so as to avoid the kind of prideful idolatry that claims to have rationally exhausted knowledge of the Divine. The “conservative” who finds it necessary to preserve the constancy of tradition for fear of having to revise, complicate, or shatter “traditional ideas” is not suffering from a particular intellectual idiosyncrasy; for Aquinas, such a person is simply wrong about how ideas work, not to mention potentially heretical.”

I’m not that familiar with Aquinas; does this seems like an accurate summary? In any case, seems like a useful argument against the religious “conservative” movement.