Great. I've been asked to speak to you this afternoon about common objections to the rationality of faith or arguments that are typically advanced to show that faith and reason are in conflict with one another.

This is a topic or an area I'm familiar with since I studied in graduate school for many, many years with

professors who were hardcore atheists and had no difficulty articulating and advancing their arguments.

We heard them all the time.

So what I'd like to do is articulate some of the most common ones that they gave me. I would or gave us, I guess you could say,

and I'd like to discuss them amongst us. There's a lot of brain power in this room, so if we

put our heads together and think about these arguments, we can see through them rather quickly

and easily and various flaws and problems that they have,

but they also have a function of setting before us the magnitude of what we're dealing with

when we try to advance the gospel or the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas or the practice of the Catholic faith

in the contemporary university context. Also, I'd like to get kind of everybody a discussion going

about whether these are the actual arguments that are still being used or commonly used. I have a feeling that basically where we're at

now culturally is the last one, which we'll come to, called the Christianity is evil objection,

which isn't really based on reason, or it is, but it's kind of a blend of reason and emotive

kind of outbursts or sob stories or various

things. So we'll come to that. So let's just put it this way. We'll begin talking as if reason

was still in play in the contemporary discourse. So to the extent that things are discussed,

rationally discussed, or settled by reason,

there's exchanges of reasons.

So we'll discuss some of the most common exchanges of reasons.

And then at the end, we can ask ourselves,

maybe reason isn't really playing that kind of role in our society anymore,

...