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. So, by nature, as rational animals, we not only have physical senses

to encounter the world, but we have intelligence that enables us to read it. We understand, to an

extent, what things are. And we can also read in the natural

world a message about its author. Theologians have called the fact that creation speaks this

message about God, the sacramentality of creation. So Aquinas tells us that we can come to know something

of God, quote, from the knowledge of

sensible things. And sensible in Thomistic language doesn't mean like, oh yeah, that's really reasonable.

That was a sensible, not an emotional thing to do. It means like having the things that we encounter

through our senses, right? Because these sensible things are his effects and depend on their cause, we can be led

from them so far as to know about God whether he exists and to know what must necessarily

belong to him as the first cause of all things who exceeds all things caused by him.

So it's possible following St. Thomas's thought to do

sort of a metaphysical proof for the existence of God, that's not where we're going in this

talk. If I was at my home university, I'd say you're going to do that in your metaphysics

class. But that's not true here, but you could find it in other places.

St. Thomas tells us we can do-duce from the world that there is a first cause when we call God

and something about his goodness, spiritual nature, and wisdom.

Some of the Greek philosophers do this, right? Plato, Aristotle.

...