Yes, good day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and today I am joined around the bar table by Father James Brent, who is one of the most brilliant and articulate and convincing Dominicans, just people actually that I've ever encountered.

So he's a Dominican friar. Let's see here. He lives and teaches philosophy at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from St. Louis University where he wrote on Thomas Aquinas on the rationality of faith.

He was ordained a priest in 2010. He frequently gives lectures for the domestic institute and often travels to give retreats for college students and young adults. He's also the promoter of the angelic warfare, confraternity for the Dominican province of St. Joseph.

I'm going to put some links in the description below so that you can learn more from him. In particular, there was a specific talk that he gave. And it was because of that talk that I decided to engage with Father Brent, I'm going to have that below as well.

You're just going to absolutely love this. Basically, we talk about the soil out of which atheists grow or atheism grows. We talk about materialism, mechanicism. I keep calling it mechanism.

So I think I even spelled that wrong in the thing I put up in a minute, but mechanicism, nominalism, what else? Skepticism, relativism. We talk about these things.

We talk about how there's a different way of looking at reality and that in order to be sort of a big tent platenist, you have to be an anti materialist, an anti-nominalist, etc.

And that that will actually dispose you to arguments for God's existence. Because if you ever had an argument with an atheist and you're like, man, I'm arguing, but I get the sense that I'm arguing not just against a proposition, God does not exist, but against a sort of matrix of beliefs.

That's what we get into today. So there was some really heavy lifting philosophy in this. And I think you're going to, I'm quite convinced, especially if you're philosophically inclined and enjoy these kind of big conversations, you're going to very much enjoy this.

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Hello. H L L O W dot com. Okay. Okay. Here is my very interesting and fascinating. Interesting fascinating. One is hired. I don't know. Episode with Father James brand.

Thank you for having me. Yeah. You gave it. You gave a talk last year on Big Tent Platonism. And it was just so powerful for me. And one of the reasons I knew it was powerful is I was actually pausing and writing down what you were saying in my notebook. Now a lot of people might just naturally do that when they listen to lectures. I never do that. But I just found this so gripping that I had to I had to listen to it. We're going to put the link.

To that talk in the description below so that people can listen to it. But I wanted to kind of have you on the show to flesh this out a little more. And one of the main things you were saying is.

You know, when you're arguing with an atheist, it's not like you're merely trying to dislodge the proposition does got exist. If you've ever spent time arguing with an atheist, you get the sense that you're dealing with this.

This whole sort of matrix. There's a whole lot more going on under the surface. You know, you might sort of say this talk was about what I want to discuss in this interview is the soil out of which modern atheism grows. And that's what we want to talk about today.

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