As Father Gary said, I'm teaching philosophy in our philosophy department at our school in Berkeley.

And so that's also my approach to this topic. I'm not taking a theological approach,

or a more pious approach, perhaps. I'm really asking about the philosophical evaluation of the data,

the evidence that we have and the principles that go into that.

And philosophy actually has more recently picked up on a lot of these topics.

Philosophy of religion was pretty much dead for a long while.

I mean, with logical positivism and the 40s and 50s, nobody would touch that.

But it is big, it is back big times, basically.

There are lots of journals for philosophy of religion.

And they're doing topics that you would think are absolutely theological in nature.

So the philosophy of, I mean, certainly there's faith and reason questions.

There is proofs to the existence of God.

There's questions about theodicy,

divine hiddenness, the afterlife, even atonement of all things. You wouldn't believe that philosophers talk about that,

but also philosophy of miracles. That's actually something that's, I think, just beginning.

And so what I'm doing then is to look at

that from purely from the viewpoint of reason rather than faith although that

will be involved in other ways and it is obviously I mean a huge there are a lot of side subjects and is a complex topic,

and I cannot do everything tonight.

But I will do go through a number of things, and basically the two parts, first of all.

I can actually write on this thing.

I'm hesitant.

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