A preamble of “the preamble of faith”

The article examines the problem of rationality / epistemological justification of religious faith and theistic belief. Traditionally, natural theology has been thought to guarantee the necessary prerequisites for the rationality of religious faith. However, in the context of contemporary culture, natural theology itself, as a rational inquiry into the existence and attributes of God, needs epistemological justification. The purpose of this article is to examine the various possibilities for justifying the rationality of both religious faith and natural theology. The article consists of four main sections. The first section discusses the distinction between religious faith and theistic belief. The second section discusses the ideas of Aurelius Augustine and Thomas Aquinas that are relevant to contemporary debates about the possibility of knowledge of God. The third section presents an analysis of contemporary approaches to the problem of the rationality of religious faith and theistic belief, in particular the accounts of R. Swinburne and A. Plantinga. The fourth section presents the voluntarist model of justification of theistic belief, based on Plantinga’s account of sensus divinitatis and Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the role of the will in the formation of belief. This model allows us not only to show how a natural theistic belief can be rational, but also to be at the foundation of religious faith and to be the starting point of natural theology.