Why Should We Believe God Exists? | Prof. Gregory Doolan (duplicate)

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on December 7, 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/mrrhu2sp. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Gregory T. Doolan received his B.A. in political theory from Georgetown University in 1993 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 2003. He taught philosophy at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. from 2004–05 and joined the faculty of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in 2005. Dr. Doolan’s research interest is in the area of Aquinas’s metaphysics; in recent years, his focus has been on Aquinas’s account of the Aristotelian categories of being. A native of Philadelphia, Dr. Doolan currently lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and three children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:02.8	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.0	As the title of my talk indicates, I'm going to be speaking to you tonight about St. Thomas Aquinas on the question, whether God exists.
0:22.6	Now to keep you all, or to avoid keeping you all in suspense,
0:26.6	I'm going to cut right to the chase.
0:28.6	The answer is yes.
0:30.6	But then again, I suspect you already knew that.
0:34.6	If I were to leave the answer there, not only would this likely be the
0:41.3	shortest talk in the history of the Thomistic Institute, but the heart of the question would remain
0:48.3	unanswered. Because to pose a question such as this isn't simply to ask a factual point such as,
0:56.0	is it cold out tonight? Or do you like cheese curds?
1:01.0	With these sorts of queries, the questioner is usually satisfied with a simple yes or no answer.
1:09.0	By contrast, when someone asks whether God exists, something more is at stake
1:15.6	in the asking. What the questioner really wants to know is, can you provide evidence that, in fact,
1:23.6	God exists? Aquinas himself recognizes this deeper point of the question, which is clear from
1:31.5	his work of the Summa Theologier in which he offers his famous five ways of proving God's
1:38.1	existence, precisely in answer to the question whether God exists, which is the title of the very article
1:47.0	in which he offers those proofs.
1:50.0	The task of providing an evidentiary answer to the question might seem challenging enough,
1:58.0	but the task is even more challenging if we consider that the very posing
2:03.6	of the question is problematic. What exactly is it whose existence we're trying to prove?
2:12.6	Aquinas himself frequently reminds us that in this lifetime we do not, indeed we cannot know God's
	...

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