The subject I'm going to talk about today is the question of whether the human being is naturally religious.

And, you know, my own formation background is more in academic theology, but I will make some appeals to philosophical positions or talk about philosophical positions.

This talk is somewhat popular in the sense that I'm giving an

introduction. So if you're an academic philosopher, you may find that the positions are not

articulated as technically as they could be. It's true. This is a sort of postcard overview.

But I do want to expose different positions and try to think about options intellectually

and then situate Aquinas' view, which I'm sympathetic to for reasons I'll explain, situate

his view relative to other views.

So let me start, as the handout might suggest, you don't need to look at the handout, but

it would give you a clue here what's going on. I want to start by talking about two contrasting positions that

also differ from that of Aquinas at the beginning. And one of them is a very important, historically

important theological position, which is that religion is a virtue in the human person that is not primarily natural,

but rather, as the medieval theologians would say, supernatural. It's an effect or fruit of grace

and charity. And so the human being is in a certain sense not naturally religious. That may

seem like a strange place to start, but as you'll see, I hope, it actually is a strangely

modern position.

And then the positions I want to look at in counterreaction, which in a way mirror that position

as an opposite, are a series of positions that argue in different and nuanced ways that religion

is fundamentally unnatural, that in a certain sense the human being

is naturally secular, or that religion represents a kind of alienation of the human mind

from its own kind of true domain, and it's not, religious stances towards human existence

are sort of ill-conceived. So after I've laid out those two kinds of positions,

...