Faith and reason, write St. John Paul II, are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.

And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word to know himself,

so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

That's from the introduction to fetus at Ratzio.

Now, as we have come to appreciate or as we ourselves have experienced in the contemporary

university setting, faith and reason are often seen as being in conflict.

I would submit to you that this is the result of a methodological misunderstanding.

So faith and reason, if conducted in genuine or sincere or authentic ways, are not in conflict,

but rather when they are practiced in a way that is unresponsible,

then they can come to be seen as in conflict.

In order to prove this, we could go about this in many different ways,

but the subject for tonight is whether faith in God is reasonable,

or whether it's rational to believe in God.

So what I intend to do is to show how reason operates

within the context of faith, both natural and supernatural. So it's a very modest claim, but we'll

proceed through a couple of steps, and at the end, we'll give a little bit of exposition to one

of the arguments for God's existence that St. Thomas gives.

We won't treat it in all of its bewildering detail, but just get a sense for the shape.

Okay? So we're going to begin with a consideration of the object of study.

So St. Thomas uses the language of formal and material objects.

So we'll consider really what's at stake in faith discourse.

Okay. And then we'll proceed to a description of natural belief as an analogy whereby to describe what comes next, which is supernatural belief. And then we'll conclude with that, with a third way.

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