Is Belief in God Rational? | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was offered at Ohio State University on April 7th, 2022. For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. 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.
0:04.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:08.0	Is belief in God rational?
0:14.0	And as a subtitle, Aquinas on living with the limits of reason.
0:20.0	Is it rational to believe in God? on living with the limits of reason.
0:21.4	Is it rational to believe in God?
0:24.8	There is a conventional modern to mystic answer
0:27.7	that would address this in terms of faith and reason,
0:31.5	showing how some truths about God's existence and nature
0:34.4	can be known using philosophical argument, and then explaining how the distinctive
0:39.4	mysteries of Christian faith, which are beyond rational demonstration, doctrines such as the
0:45.3	Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and resurrection, can still be rationally defended
0:51.5	against any and all philosophical objection.
0:55.7	While this approach is legitimately tomistic, such a conventional presentation of faith and
1:02.0	reason leaves out some important dimensions of the rationality of belief in God,
1:07.1	according to Aquinas. It leaves the impression that for Aquinas, the rationality of theistic
1:13.2	belief in general is something dependent on philosophical proof. It also suggests that specifically
1:20.2	Christian faith is reasonable only insofar as it can be philosophically defended from criticism,
1:26.7	as if the mysteries of faith are only
1:29.5	rational insofar as they are compatible with what is philosophically demonstrable.
1:35.5	What I want to emphasize in this talk, however, is how Aquinas' conception of rational theological
1:41.8	belief includes both much less than and much more than strictly
	...

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