Faith, Reason, And Reasonable Belief | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 22, 2022 at the US Military Academy at West Point. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics 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 served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.5	There's a conventional, modern, to mystic account of faith and reason that would proceed in three steps.
0:18.7	First, sketch St. Thomas's general theory of knowledge, especially anticipating
0:24.6	skeptical concerns with some account of Aquinas' confident epistemological realism, or the ability of reason,
0:32.2	to grasp the natures of things. Then, as a special case of this capacity to know in general, proceed to show
0:41.7	how truths about God's existence and nature can be known using rational argument. And then finally,
0:49.8	explain the relationship between faith and reason in terms of the apologetic or evangelistic uses of rational argument.
0:57.7	Reason can prove some truths about God and even the distinctive mysteries of Christian faith, which are beyond rational demonstration,
1:05.2	doctrines such as the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and resurrection, can still be rationally defended against any and
1:13.3	all philosophical objection. While this approach is legitimately to mystic, such a conventional
1:21.9	presentation of faith and reason leaves out some important dimensions of the reasonableness of belief in God, according to Aquinas.
1:30.9	It leaves the impression that for Aquinas, the reasonableness of theistic belief in general is something
1:36.5	dependent on philosophical proof. It also suggests that specifically Christian faith is
1:42.6	reasonable only insofar as it can be philosophically
1:46.1	defended from criticism, as if the mysteries of faith insofar as they go beyond what is rationally
1:51.3	demonstrable are not reasonable. What I want to emphasize in this talk, however, is how Aquinas'
1:58.9	conception of reasonable belief includes both what is much less than
2:03.9	and what is much more than strictly demonstrative proofs or philosophical argumentation.
2:11.0	There are ways in which, without depending on rational argument at all, belief in God is reasonable.
2:19.7	There are ways that philosophical arguments have important religious value beyond their capacity to prove truths or refute falsehoods.
2:27.5	And there are ways in which supernatural faith is reasonable, not only as being logically
	...

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