Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St Joseph.

I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Tomistic Institute and this is Pines with

Aquinas.

In this episode I'd like to talk about how it is rational to

believe in God or how it's reasonable to live the life of faith. So many of our

secular contemporaries think that belief is irrational,

that just as soon as one starts believing, one stops thinking.

As if belief were a kind of fidiistic choice to live a subhuman life, a kind of phidiistic choice to live a subhuman life a kind of regressive

barbaric move as it were but this is not in fact what transpires and Christians

can marshal reasons for their belief and they can deploy reason

even in the setting of their belief. So I want to talk about that with you and walk through

some of the steps whereby we can argue for it. So here we go.

Okay, so I have been thinking about this recently because I was out on the

West Coast giving some talks for TI campus

chapters. I spoke at Cal and then at Stanford and then at U.S. and then at U of O and while at U.S. this was the theme and I thought that I kind of like

propose it as an honest or humane or reasonable approach to reality because many of our secular contemporaries would characterize

belief as dishonest before reality. So highlight a lot of the things about our

experience which are absurd or which are incoherent and say that it's our responsibility

to kind of come before those experiences and to remain resolute as if belief were a kind of escape hatch, as if it were a way in which we kind of compromise on the

integrity of our experience and then just choose something easier or at the very least kind of

of like knowetically more straightforward.

So yeah you have examples of this in absurdist literature you can think of Albert Camus with

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