Proofs for the Existence of God | Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2019

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was offered at Trinity College, Dublin on November 6, 2019.

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Fr. 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. In 2019 Fr. White was named a McDonald Agape Foundation Distinguished Scholar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What, you know, what I, I'm more specialized in dogmatic theology, but I do work a little bit on Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas, Metaphysics and arguments for the existence of God and that kind of thing.
0:12.0	So I'll tell you a little bit of going into this talk a little bit about Aquinas on pre-philosophical knowledge of God and then talk about
0:22.5	what proofs for the existence of God might even mean for at least St. Thomas in his approach.
0:28.6	This is the kind of talk where if you've never heard any of this before, it could seem a little
0:34.0	conceptually complicated, although I assure you it's quite masterable or at least it's more
0:40.7	approachable if you spend time with it. And if you've worked it seems overly simplistic,
0:46.3	and that's okay too. I mean if you want to oppose objections to things either from non-religious
0:51.3	or from otherwise to mystic points of view or if you have some
0:55.8	ardent desire to defend Anselm of Canterbury, any of that, you know, I'm really open
1:01.4	to an interesting conversation.
1:03.3	I am going to read this paper, which will have the advantage of being clear and maybe the
1:08.1	disadvantage of being dry, but we'll work through it and I think it's about 45 minutes long so let me start by talking to you
1:15.6	about some of my presuppositions just talking about this issue as a you might
1:20.5	just say a thinking human being my first presupposition is that human beings I
1:26.8	think can have real knowledge of God without having first proven the existence of God by philosophical measures.
1:33.3	How that may be is itself an interesting question, but it seems that young children can pray to God, and of course I'm here presuming that God exists.
1:41.3	It seems that children can say and know very profound
1:44.7	things about God and say and profound things to God.
1:48.7	So there seems to be a pre-demonstrative knowledge of God that comes from intuitions
1:53.7	about the world that we could call pre-philosophical or proto-philosophical.
1:58.8	Whereas philosophical demonstrations are more concentrated in
2:02.0	intellectually focused ways of testing and refining our thinking about God so as to
	...

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