Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

Tonight, the talk is about the rationality of belief in God.

Is belief in God rational?

Being able to answer this question naturally depends, in part, on our being able to answer this question naturally depends in part on our being able to answer

three prior questions.

I have a handout there that has the outline of the talk and then a summary of the main points

of the talk which I'm going to go over at the end.

I don't know if there's enough for everybody,

but if you don't have a copy, maybe there's someone next to you you can share with.

So is belief in God rational? So asking this question, in order to answer this question,

we need to answer three prior questions.

And they are, the first is what is belief?

Second is, what makes belief rational?

And the third is, what is God?

I'm going to take these three in order. So we start with what is belief.

I think that it helps to define belief by comparing it to knowledge.

Both belief and knowledge consist in judgments, the judgments that we make about reality. To make a judgment is to

determine that something is so or not so, that, for example, my coffee is cold or that it is not cold,

or that it is raining or that it is not raining. When I do that, I make a judgment.

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