Aquinas vs. Kant
Renewing Your Mind
Ligonier Ministries
4.8 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Creation demonstrates the existence of God, leaving unbelievers without excuse. So, why are so many people still skeptical? Today, R.C. Sproul assesses the influence of Immanuel Kant's philosophy on our relativistic age.
Get 46 messages from R.C. Sproul with your donation. You'll receive his teaching series Defending Your Faith on a special-edition DVD, plus the digital messages and study guide. You'll also get his digital series Apologetics of the Early Church: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/
Live outside the U.S. and Canada? Request both digital teaching series and the digital study guide with your donation: https://www.renewingyourmind.org/global
Meet Today's Teacher:
R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew's Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine.
Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | 18th century philosopher Emmanuel Kant questioned whether we could know anything about God. |
| 0:06.0 | And many theologians of his era said things like this. |
| 0:10.0 | You can maybe assume the existence of God, presuppose the existence of God, |
| 0:14.0 | or grant the existence of God by faith, but what you cannot do is prove the existence of God by rational categories. |
| 0:29.9 | Many theologians, however, refused to buy Kant's argument. |
| 0:34.0 | They look back at men like Thomas Aquinas, who asserted that God's existence could indeed |
| 0:38.9 | be proven. |
| 0:40.4 | Hello and welcome to the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and let's dive into this |
| 0:44.7 | debate. |
| 0:45.7 | Here's R.C. Sprole from his series, Defending Your Faith. |
| 0:52.4 | St. Thomas Aquinas, who is called the Dr. Angelicus or the angelic doctor of the Roman Catholic |
| 0:59.0 | Church, was a titan in the realm of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages. |
| 1:06.0 | And he is most responsible for constructing what is known in the history of theoretical thought |
| 1:13.8 | as the classical synthesis. |
| 1:18.2 | That is by showing that philosophy as well as theology manifested the truth of the existence of God. |
| 1:30.3 | And so strong was this synthesis that it was rare in those days for intellectuals to challenge |
| 1:38.3 | the notion of the existence of God. |
| 1:42.3 | And historically, the principal arguments for the existence of God. And historically, the principal arguments for the existence of God |
| 1:48.1 | were the following. First of all, there was the famous ontological argument for the existence |
| 1:56.2 | of God, which we'll look at later, which had been formulated early on by Augustine in his version, |
| 2:03.3 | but made most famous by the version set forth by St. Anselm of Canterbury, and the |
| 2:11.9 | ontological argument for the existence of God was an argument for God from being. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 27 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ligonier Ministries, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Ligonier Ministries and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.