Welcome back to the Word on Fire show.

I'm Dr. Matthew Patrusick, Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the

Word on Fire show. Thank you, as always, for joining us.

Friends, in honor of St. John Henry Newman's recently being named a doctor of the church,

we're bringing you Bishop Barron's entire Word on Fire Institute lecture series on John Henry Newman.

In these final weeks, we'll wrap up our series on one of Bishop Barron's spiritual and

intellectual heroes. As always, enjoy.

We are continuing our study of the grammar of assent, Newman's masterpiece on religious

epistemology. How do we come to know an assent to religious truth? This next section

is on Ascent in relation to inference. And his dialogue partner here is the philosopher John Locke. I mentioned

earlier how he both kind of loved and balked at Locke. Here he's rather powerfully disagreeing

with the great English philosopher. Lock had argued this, that our assent to a proposition ought to be in direct proportion

to the quality of inferential support we can find for the proposition.

It's a fancy way of saying, look, if you got a good argument for it, your assent should

be strong. You got a midland level argument for it, your ascent should be strong.

You got a midland level argument for it, your assent should be kind of middle level.

You got a lousy argument, your assent should be very restricted.

Ascent should be correlated very strictly to the quality of inference that supports it.

Here's Locke.

It is not only illogical, but immoral to carry our assent above the evidence that a proposition is true, to have a surplice of assurance beyond the degrees of that evidence.

That's just what I was saying there.

You've got a bad argument, but you're giving full assent.

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