When is Religious Belief Irrational? On the Harmony of Faith and Reason | Fr. Thomas Joseph White OP

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2019

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was offered at University College Dublin on February 6th, 2019. For more information about upcoming TI events in North America visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1/

For Europe, visit: angelicum.it/thomistic-institute/thomistic-events/

Speaker Bio:

Fr. Thomas Joseph White is the Director of the Thomistic Institute at the Angelicum. He did his doctoral studies at Oxford University, and has research interests in metaphysics, Christology, Trinitarian theology, and the theology of grace. His books include The Incarnate Lord, A Thomistic Study in Christology (2015) and The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (2017). He is co-editor of the academic journal Nova et Vetera and in 2011 was appointed an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What I hope to do in the next maybe 40 minutes or so and then take questions and answers is provide a kind of speculative overview.
0:07.3	That's to say a theoretical overview for how in the Catholic tradition people consider the question of religious rationality or you might say irrationality.
0:18.5	Look, the traditional Catholic conviction is that there are all kinds of ways human beings often fail to be reasonable, and it's true also of in the order of religious behavior.
0:34.2	So in a certain way, the people who are especially skeptical about religion because
0:39.1	they think it leads to irrationality or it's based on irrational principles are not entirely
0:43.3	in every respect enemies of the tradition of Catholic thinking. But you can go back and speak more
0:48.9	radically and say, well, where in the tradition are the first criticisms of religious irrationality? Well, I mean,
0:56.6	fundamentally in the Western tradition, it's in the Judaic revelation or the claims of the
1:01.3	biblical prophets to expose the religious irrationality and superstition of the human race.
1:06.7	So actually, if you find the sharpest critiques of religious behavior, typically in the Old Testament prophets.
1:14.2	And that continues through into the New Testament and became thematic in the early patristic period,
1:18.7	the first 500 years of Christian thinking.
1:21.6	And you find it in, say, Augustine's city of God, where he goes on a rather intensive critique of Greco-Roman
1:29.4	religiosity and tries to expose what he thinks are the irrationalisms of a lot of pre-Judeic,
1:39.0	or non-Judeic, pre-Christian religious traditions. So you could then, you know, worry about that being
1:45.6	to exclusivist or to narrow-minded or not open-minded or maybe not self-critical enough.
1:52.5	That's an interesting question. I'm just speaking about some historical background before I give
1:56.6	the real presentation. The other side of this is you have a critique of religious
2:00.3	rationality in the Western
2:01.3	tradition that stems from Greek philosophy, and you find it in Plato and Aristotle,
2:05.7	who are in some sense arguably religious men, but they're worried about the gods of the poets,
2:11.6	as they say, and the myths of the city.
	...

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