 Maritain also acknowledges the possibility of a natural, pre-philosophical, but still rational knowledge of God (see Approches de Dieu, pp. 13–22). This is, Maritain claims, a ‘knowledge’ that is necessary to—and, in fact leads to—a philosophical demonstration of God’s existence. (In this way, then, one can know that some religious beliefs are true, even without being able to demonstrate them.) Maritain’s argument, which resembles the Thomistic argument from contingent being, is that, in one’s intuition of being, one is aware, first, of a reality separate from oneself; second, of oneself as finite and limited; and, third, of the necessity that there is something “completely free from nothingness and death” (ibid., p. 15 [Engl. tr., p. 19]). This is concurrent with a “spontaneous reasoning” that follows the same course to the conclusion that there is 