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As the title of my talk indicates, I'm going to be speaking to you about St. Thomas Aquinas on the question, whether God exists. And to avoid keeping you all in suspense,

I'll cut right to the chase. His answer is yes. But then again, I suspect you already knew that.

And if I were to leave the answer there, not only would this likely be the shortest talk in the history of the

Thomistic Institute, but the heart of the question would remain unanswered, because if you pose a

question such as this, it isn't simply to ask a factual point, like, did the Blazers win yesterday's

basketball game? Or do you like fried to make green fried tomatoes?

Fried green tomatoes.

Got to get that right.

With these sorts of queries, the questioner is usually satisfied with a simple yes or no answer.

By contrast, when someone asks whether God exists, something more is at stake.

Something more is at stake in the asking.

What the questioner really wants to know is, can you provide evidence that, in fact, there is a God, that God exists.

And Aquinas himself recognizes this deeper point of the question, which is clear from his

work the Summa Theologiae or the summary of theology in which he offers his famous five ways of

proving God's existence, five arguments to prove the existence of God, precisely in answer to the question whether

God exists, which is the title of the very article in which he offers those proofs.

Now, the task of providing an evidentiary answer to this question, giving us evidence of this fact, might seem challenging

enough, but the task is even more challenging if we consider that the very posing of the question

is kind of problematic. What exactly is it whose existence we're trying to prove?

You know, Aquinas himself frequently reminds us that in this lifetime, we do not, in fact, we cannot

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