Does God Exist? | Prof. Gaven Kerr

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2023

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 29, 2023 at Trinity College Dublin. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Gaven Kerr is a married father of three and a third order Dominican. He has degrees in scholastic philosophy and philosophy from Queen’s University Belfast: BA, MPhil, and PhD. His doctoral research was on the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. Gaven’s research focuses on the thought of St Thomas Aquinas and his connection with other important thinkers in the history of philosophy and theology. He has published articles in the Thomist, the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, International Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Philosophical Research, Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society. Gaven has two books with Oxford University Press. The first was published in 2015, Aquinas’s Way to God, and it dealt with Aquinas’s proof of God in the De Ente et Essentia. His second book which is due out later this year is on Aquinas and the metaphysics of creation. Gaven has taught philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, St. Malachy’s Seminary Belfast, and Maynooth University. He has taught theology at Mary Immaculate College Limerick. He currently teaches philosophy at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:30.0	So when asked to speak about the existence of God and the question of does God exist,
0:34.9	I'm naturally going to turn to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. So this is
0:39.2	what I specialize in. Aquinas' philosophical thought, and particularly his philosophical thought on the
0:44.4	existence of God. And Aquinas' name is almost synonymous with attempts of proving God's existence.
0:50.3	He's not the only philosopher, theologian to do that, but he's certainly one of the most popular ones.
0:57.0	And when Aquinas gets into demonstrations of God's existence, such as in the Contra Gentiles, or the very famous infamous now, five ways of the Sumatiology I, he precedes these demonstrations with a consideration of the logic of demonstration.
1:11.6	What is the logic of demonstration and what is the nature of a scientific demonstration?
1:16.6	So a lot of people when they read the Five Ways, they go straight to question two,
1:21.6	Article 3, where he presents the Five Ways.
1:24.6	A lot of people don't read the initial articles before that
1:27.5	where he sets out the logic of demonstration.
1:30.0	And Thomas, when he's demonstrating God's existence,
1:32.6	he has a very explicit logical framework in mind.
1:36.8	It's a framework adopted from Aristotle's prior and posterior analytics.
1:42.3	For Aquinas, a demonstration is always going to be in the form of a syllogism.
1:47.0	And a syllogism, if you don't know what it is, it's just a basic argument formed with our
1:51.5	style sort of discovered. So an example is, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore
1:57.9	Socrates is mortal. Socrates is mortal. Socrates is mortal. Socrates is mortal. So all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore
	...

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