Does God Exist? And How Could We Know? | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

The lecture was given to West Virginia University on October 16, 2020.

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About the Speaker:

Joshua Hochschild is the Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he’s been elected to serve as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.6	Does God exist and how could we know?
0:15.8	I find this topic a temptation.
0:19.7	As a philosopher, I am tempted by these questions to spend time explaining
0:24.6	rational demonstrations for the existence of God. And as a tomistic philosopher, I'm especially
0:30.8	tempted to defend these proofs as part of a general account of the role that they play
0:36.4	in the overall thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.
0:39.9	This is the kind of temptation that typically leads a to mystic philosopher to make a presentation
0:46.0	in three stages. First, and as a kind of preface, to sketch St. Thomas's theory of knowledge,
0:55.9	especially anticipating skeptical concerns with some account of Aquinas' confident epistemological realism.
1:02.6	Then, having thus framed knowledge of God as a special case of our capacity to know in general,
1:09.2	to proceed to the second and main stage addressing God's
1:13.3	existence as something that can be demonstrated using rational argument. Here, in the thick of
1:19.0	natural theology or metaphysics, we would see clear expositions of one or more of Aquinas
1:24.3	particular arguments demonstrating God's existence.
1:29.0	Finally, and after these two properly philosophical steps, the first one epistemological,
1:33.8	the second one metaphysical, in a third stage and as a kind of coda, to address the relation
1:40.7	between faith and reason. We would hear about how for Aquinas, philosophical argument
1:46.1	can serve a Christian's apologetic or evangelistic purposes, proving some things about God,
1:52.6	and also given the Christian confidence in the harmony of faith and reason,
1:57.3	defending against objection the distinctive mysteries of Christian faith, such as the doctrines of the Trinity,
	...

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