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I've been asked tonight to speak about the question, does God exist?

And I will devote some attention to giving an argument sourced in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas

for answering that question in the affirmative.

But I'm going to spend about half of the lecture talking about the question, does God exist?

Sort of preliminary things, you know, what it would mean to answer the question.

What does the question mean?

So the lecture is going to be split kind of in half between kind of preliminary treatment of

the question, does God exist? And then a very quick introductory overview of one of St. Thomas's

arguments for the existence of God. All right. So I think it's safe to say that we can all agree that if there is

any distinction between big or great questions and small questions, then the question does God exist

is going to be among the very biggest of questions. Now, we think of questions as big or great for several reasons. Sometimes

a question is big because of how fundamentally its answer might impact our understanding of

the world, or how its answer might provide a principle for answering other questions. We might

say that this is a big question in theoretical or scientific terms.

Sometimes the question is big because of how much the answer to the question matters to us,

or how much the answer to the question might impact the way that we live.

Such a question is great morally or existentially. And sometimes we call a question

big just because of how difficult that question is or because of how much disagreement or

discussion there is about that question. As we might say that right now a certain question

in a given field is a big question just because

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