Responding To Contemporary Atheism | Fr. James Brent, O.P.
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2019
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
On July 10th- 14th the Thomistic Institute held our first annual "Student Leadership Conference" at the Dominican House of Studies
on the theme "Faith, Reason, & the Mind’s Ascent to God"
Aquinas offers a robust account of faith and reason, and the way that human beings can come to real knowledge of the divine. Understanding these truths is central not only to the Catholic faith, but to all knowledge of reality because God is the transcendent cause of all being, the source of intelligibility, and truth itself.
PRESENTERS INCLUDED:
Fr. Dominic Legge, OP (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception and the Thomistic Institute)
Prof. Ed Feser (Pasadena City College)
Fr. James Brent, OP (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception)
and a keynote address by R.R. Reno (First Things)
For more info about upcoming TI events, visit: www.thomisticinstitute.org/events
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm going to be speaking to you this morning about addressing contemporary atheism. |
| 0:07.1 | But in fact, it's going to be a much larger scale talk than that. |
| 0:12.2 | Because what happens when we come up against atheism, or even just agnosticism, really, |
| 0:20.1 | the same phenomenon, or a similar phenomenon, of course. |
| 0:26.2 | If you've ever gotten into a conversation with someone who advocates the atheist position |
| 0:30.7 | or takes some kind of agnostic position, you start to get the feeling as you go along |
| 0:36.2 | or get the sense that you're dealing with something |
| 0:39.4 | or you're up against something much bigger than just a commitment to a particular proposition |
| 0:45.0 | such as, you know, God doesn't exist or a doubt about that proposition. |
| 0:50.1 | And in fact, that's correct. |
| 0:51.9 | What you're confronting when you're confronting atheism is a large-scale, deep philosophical matrix. |
| 1:01.0 | Okay. So the atheism is really embedded, the contemporary atheism is deeply embedded in this large-scale philosophical matrix. |
| 1:13.4 | And what I want to do this morning is spend some time outlining the contours of this |
| 1:21.4 | large-scale matrix. |
| 1:23.0 | And as I do so, I think you'll start to realize, wait a second, this isn't just a particular |
| 1:29.9 | philosophical position. This is like the world in which we live. That's right. So in a sense, |
| 1:35.6 | when you're confronting the atheism, you're taking on the world, okay? That's why you're running, |
| 1:42.4 | that's why it's not that easy or it's, things run much deeper. |
| 1:47.0 | And this allows you to accommodate or readjust your expectations and intentions without falling into despair. |
| 1:55.3 | We'll get to that. |
| 1:56.5 | And also allows you to realize, I think, the spiritual significance of the Thomistic Institute |
| 2:04.3 | and the things that are unfolding here and your participation in it. |
... |
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