EDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Edward Feser just released a new book, titled Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press, 2017). You probably know Dr. Feser from his sharply reasoned posts here at Strange Notions, or from his popular blog, which mainly focuses on the philosophy of religion.

Dr. Feser has written several other excellent books, including:

• Neo-Scholastic Essays (St. Augustine's Press, 2015)
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions, 2014)
• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine's Press, 2010)
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2009)
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2006)

He is a Thomistic philosopher, meaning he specializes in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and has written extensively on Aquinas' Five Ways (or five proofs) to God. But in his new book, he examines not just the Thomistic arguments for God, but several more. Here's a brief summary:

Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.
 
This book also offers a detailed treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.
 
This book offers as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past—thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others—that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism which gives aid and comfort to atheism.

We recently invited Dr. Feser to do an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) here at Strange Notions, and after he accepted, the questions poured in from all of our commenters, both believer and skeptic alike. 

We chose several of the most popular questions to ask Dr. Feser below. Enjoy!

QUESTION (Jonathan): I read once on a blog post that the proofs for God were not intended as rhetorical or polemical proofs, in the sense of being intended to persuade unbelievers. They were more like edifying exercises for the faithful, but medieval theologians would not say that such philosophical arguments were sufficient to instill faith. Is this true?

DR. FESER: That is not true, and I suspect that the writers you read who said this misunderstand what “faith” means for a medieval theologian like Aquinas.  The proofs were indeed meant to be completely rationally convincing even to someone who is initially coming to the question as an atheist.  No faith is required at all.

The reason is that faith, as a thinker like Aquinas understands it, is a matter of believing something because it has been revealed by God.  But before you can do that, you first have to establish that God really does exist in the first place and that he really has revealed something.  And that requires evidence and argumentation. 

Showing that God really does exist is where the proofs come in.  So far, faith doesn’t enter the picture.  Then we need to establish that God really has revealed something, and that involves showing that some purported divine revelation was associated with a miracle, because only a miracle – understood as a suspension of the natural order that only God could possibly bring about – could justify the claim that a revelation has really occurred.  That requires a mixture of philosophical and historical argumentation.  The traditional label in Catholic theology for these sorts of arguments for the authenticity of a revelation are “motives of credibility.” 

In traditional Catholic apologetics, it is only after all this argumentation is set out that one can know that something really has been revealed, and so it is only then that the question of faith really arises.  And when it does, what it means, again, is believing something because you have rationally come to know that God really did reveal it.  It is not a matter of believing something just because you want to, or working yourself up into an emotional state, or taking an irrational leap beyond the evidence, or anything like that.

It is true that faith is said to be a gift of God, but in no way does that entail any sort of irrational “will to believe” or any of the other caricatures or distortions of the concept of faith.  If someone says that his eyes are a gift from God, he isn’t saying that he is relying for his vision on a will to believe, or on an irrational leap beyond the visual evidence, or the like.  Similarly, to say that faith is a gift of God in no way implies that it is contrary to reason or involves an irrational leap beyond the evidence.

QUESTION (Bradley Robert Schneider): To what extent are the arguments in your book just different versions of, or different ways of looking at, the same (cosmological) argument? That is, can you rationally reject one of the proofs but accept another? Also, what are some of the other arguments you consider persuasive but did not include among these five?

DR. FESER: Of the five, only four of them – the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Thomistic proof, and the rationalist proof – might be considered variations on the cosmological argument.  However, the expression “cosmological argument” might be a little misleading, because it makes it sound as if the arguments start from some claim about the cosmos or universe as a whole.  And that is not the case.  As I argue in the book, one could in each case start with something much less grand than that.  For example, in the Thomistic proof, you could start with the fact that some particular stone exists here and now, and proceed from that to show that there must be a single eternal, immaterial, immutable, necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good uncaused cause of its existing here and now.  No fancy claim about the universe as a whole is needed as a premise.

The fifth argument, the Augustinian proof, is very different.  It is not a causal argument from the existence of some thing in the world to God as its cause, but rather an argument from mathematical and other necessary truths to an infinite divine intellect.

One could accept one of the proofs while rejecting one or more of the others.  For example, a reader might find the Aristotelian proof compelling but not be persuade by the Neo-Platonic proof, or might find the Augustinian proof powerful but not any of the causal proofs, or vice versa.

There are several other arguments I think are compelling but which I did not put into the book, because I judged that they required just too much in the way of controversial background metaphysical argumentation to be useful for the particular purposes of this book.  For example, I think that all of Aquinas’s Five Ways are sound arguments, and I have defended them all in various other writings.  But to defend the Fourth Way (for example) requires first defending so much in the way of background metaphysical theses well beyond what I already cover in the book that it just isn’t a suitable argument for the kind of audience I intend to address in the book.  In the Further Reading section of the book I direct readers to sources that defend the other arguments that I think are persuasive.

QUESTION (Doug Shaver): Regardless of one's worldview, any proof must, by logical necessity, rest on one or more assumptions, which are premises that are stipulated to be unprovable. Can Dr. Feser list some of the assumptions on which at least one of his proofs of God's existence depends?

DR. FESER: Depending on what you mean by “unprovable,” I don’t necessarily agree with the premise behind your question.  Take, for example, the principle of sufficient reason, which the rationalist proof appeals to as a premise.  Is it “unprovable”?  That depends on what you mean.  If by “provable” you mean “derivable by deductive inference from premises that are more certain or fundamental,” then no, it is not provable.  But if by “provable” you mean “defensible by arguments which any rational person ought to find compelling,” then I would say yes, it is provable.

The reason is this.  The principle of sufficient reason, correctly understood – and as I argue in the book, lots of people don’t understand it correctly – is a “first principle.”  What that means is that it is more clearly correct than anything that could be said either for it or against it.  When we reach claims like this, we’ve hit bedrock.  They are so basic to rationality that they are presupposed by other arguments, but don’t in turn presuppose anything deeper than they are themselves.  Hence we can’t defend them by the same kind of reasoning by which we defend less fundamental claims.

But that does not by any means entail that we cannot say anything in defense of them, or that they rest on faith, or an act of will, or anything like that.  We can rationally defend them in an indirect way.  We can show, for example, that objections to them are mistaken in various ways.  More importantly, we can defend them by the method of retorsion, which involves showing that one cannot deny them on pain of self-contradiction or incoherence.

This method is sometimes misunderstood.  Some people think it merely involves showing that we can’t help thinking a certain way, but where this leaves it open that this way of thinking might nevertheless not correspond to reality. In other words, they think that retorsion arguments are essentially about human psychology.  That is not at all the case.  Rightly understood, such arguments are a species of reductio ad absurdum argument.  They involve defending a claim by showing that the denial of the claim entails a contradiction, and thus cannot as a matter of objective fact (and not merely as a contingent matter of human psychology) be correct. 

QUESTION (Surroundx): When you speak about proofs of God, what epistemic status do you ascribe to the conclusion of each? Are they epistemically infallible, ontically infallible, or something else?

DR. FESER: The word “proof” has, historically, been used in different senses.  Naturally, I don’t mean that the arguments are proofs in exactly the same sense in which a mathematical proof is a “proof.”  They are mostly not a priori arguments, for one thing.  But I used the word deliberately, and I certainly claim a high degree of certainty for the claim that God exists.  For example, I would claim that it is as certain that God exists as it is that the world external to our minds is real and not an illusion foisted upon us by a Cartesian demon or the Matrix.

How can I say that?  Well, the point of the book to show this.  The arguments are “proofs” in that, first of all, the conclusion is claimed to follow deductively from the premises.  They are not mere probabilistic inferences, arguments to the best explanation, or “God of the gaps” arguments.  (I hate “God of the gaps” arguments.)  The claim is that the arguments show, not merely that God is the most likely explanation of the facts asserted in the premises of the arguments, but rather that God is the only possible explanation in principle of those facts. 

Second, the premises are knowable with certainty.  The premises include both empirical premises (for example, the premise that change occurs) and philosophical premises (for example, the premise that everything has an explanation or is intelligible).  The premises in turn can be defended in various ways that show them to be beyond reasonable doubt.  For example, some of them can be defended via retorsion arguments (which, again, are a species of reductio ad absurdum argument).  That is to say, such arguments try to show that anyone who denies such-and-such a claim is implicitly contradicting himself.

So in arguments of the sort I am defending, the conclusion is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises, and the premises are claimed to be knowable beyond any reasonable doubt.  That sort of argument fits one traditional use of the word “proof.”

Naturally, I am aware that some people will nevertheless challenge the arguments or remain doubtful about one or more of them.  But that’s true of every single argument one could give for any conclusion, even mathematical proofs.  A determined and clever enough skeptic will always be able to come up with some grounds for doubt, even if the grounds are bizarre or far-fetched.  That doesn’t mean that the grounds are, all things considered, going to be reasonable ones. 

Anyway, my calling something a “proof” doesn’t entail that I think every reader, even every fair-minded reader, is immediately going to be convinced.  What it is meant to indicate is the nature of the connection between the facts described in the premises and the fact described in the conclusion.  It is a metaphysical claim, not a sociological claim.  Too many people mix these things up. They think that as long as a significant number of people are likely not to agree with some argument, you can’t call it a “proof.”  That just misunderstands the way the term is being used.

QUESTION (Ryan Beren): Is God definable at all? If he is, is the definition one that can be known by humans, or only by God himself? If he is not, then how else can the truth (or falsehood) of the statement "God exists" be guaranteed?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  For Thomists (i.e. thinkers in the school of thought originating with Thomas Aquinas) to define something, in the strict sense of the term “define,” is always to locate it in a species of thing.  That in turn requires identifying the genus the species falls under and what differentiates it from other species in the same genus.  (Here I am using the terms “species” and “genus” in the broad sense in which they are historically used in logic, not the narrower sense that they later came to have in biology.)

So, take human beings, for example.  The traditional Aristotelian definition of human beings is that they are rational animals.  “Human being” is the species of thing we are defining, “animal” is the genus or more general class to which this species belongs, and “rationality” is what distinguishes them from other species in the same genus.  (Whether this definition is correct, and what exactly it is claiming, are irrelevant to the present point.  It’s just an illustration.  Pick a different example if you like.)

Now, to define something in this way entails attributing metaphysical parts to it.  For example, in defining human beings as rational animals, we are attributing both animality and rationality to human beings.  But anything with parts requires some cause or explanation outside itself to account for why it exists.  With human beings, there needs to be some explanation of how rationality and animality get together so that you have human beings.  These things are not of their nature necessarily co-occurring, after all.

Now, according to arguments of the sort I am defending, God is not like that.  He cannot have any parts at all, but must be simple or non-composite – that is to say, not composed of anything.  For if he were, then he would require a cause just like everything else does, in which case he would not be the primary or ultimate cause of things.

For that reason, there cannot be any distinction in God between some genus he belongs to and some differentiating feature that distinguishes him from other things in that genus.  Again, if there were, then God would have parts and thus require a cause of his own.  Hence, strictly speaking, God is not part of a species of things, he is not in a genus, and thus in the strict sense of the term he is not definable.  That is why the human mind inevitably finds God difficult to grasp.  Our normal mode of understanding things is to define them in terms of the genus they fall under and what differentiates them from other things in that genus, and this method cannot apply to God.

However, that does not mean that we cannot use the term “God” intelligibly, and it does not mean we cannot know anything about God.  We can say, for example, that by “God” we mean the primary or fundamental cause of there being anything at all; that when we analyze what something would have to be like in order to play such a role, it would have to have such-and-such attributes; we can note that those are precisely the sorts of attributes traditionally attributed to God; and so forth.

In short, if you mean “Can we use language about God intelligibly, so that we can discuss the question whether God exists, what he would be like if he exists, etc.?” the answer is Yes.  If you mean “Can we have the kind of penetrating knowledge of God’s nature that we have when we are able to identify the genus a thing falls under and what differentiates it from other species in that genus?” then the answer is No.  Again, it depends on how you define “define.”

QUESTION (Alexander): Is it conceivable that God does not exist?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  If you mean “Can we coherently form the thought that there is no God?” then yes, we can do that.  To be sure, if we had a complete and penetrating grasp of God’s nature, we would understand that, given that nature, it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist.   In that case we would be contradicting ourselves if we said he did not exist.  We would see that it is inconceivable that he not exist.  However, we mere human beings do not in fact have such a complete and penetrating grasp of the divine nature.  Hence we are unable directly and immediately to see the inconceivability of God’s non-existence and thus cannot deduce God’s existence via an ontological argument.  We have to arrive at knowledge of God in another way.

Now, when we reason to the existence of an uncaused cause of things as we do in arguments like the kind I defend in the book (the Aristotelian proof, the Thomistic proof, and so forth), and then we analyze what something would have to be like in order to play that role, we find that it must be something that of its nature exists in an absolutely necessary way.  We can then deduce that it must be the kind of thing which, if we had a complete grasp of its nature, we would see directly that it could not possibly not exist.  But we had to get there by reasoning from the existence of things in the world to God as their cause.  We can’t skip this procedure and just cut to the chase via an ontological argument, as Anselm tries to do.

So, if you mean “Is God the sort of thing that exists of absolute necessity, so that it is metaphysically impossible that he not exist?” then the answer is Yes.  But if you mean “Can we reason to God’s existence just by carefully unpacking the content of the concept of God, as in Anselm’s ontological argument?” then the answer is No.

QUESTION (Steven Dillon): Monotheism asserts the proposition that "Only one God exists." In quantifying the amount of Gods that exist, this proposition treats of a plurality of "Gods." In denying existence of all but one in this plurality, monotheism separates Gods from "existence", and thus treats of a plurality of abstractions, or "essences" as Thomists may say. It would seem, therefore, that monotheism is committed to a view on which a God's essence is separable from his "existence." But, for Aquinas, the essence of God just is his existence. Was Aquinas thus not a monotheist? If not, what was he?

DR. FESER: Aquinas is a monotheist, and he argues – correctly in my view, as I argue in the book – that there could not even in principle be more than one God.  One of the reasons for this is indicated in the answer I gave above to the questioner who asked about whether we can define God.  As I noted there, given that God is absolutely simple or non-composite, he cannot be defined in terms of a genus and some differentiating feature that sets him apart from other species in the genus.  Now, whenever there is more than one instance of a kind of thing, there is some genus to which it belongs, and something that differentiates it from other things in that genus.  Since these notions don’t apply to God, it follows that there is no way for him to be merely one instance of a kind of thing.  There is no genus or general class to which he belongs.  He is of his nature unique.  We get the same result when we analyze the implications of something’s being purely actual, or its having an essence that is identical to its existence, as I show in the book.

Your question seems to suppose that because we can stick an “s” at the end of the word “God,” that suffices to show that there is a general class of things we call “Gods,” and then we can ask how many things are in that class.  But that is a fallacy.  Essentially, it confuses grammar with metaphysics.  To borrow an example from Chomsky, I can form the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”  But though the sentence is perfectly well-formed, it is still nonsense.  Ideas aren’t green or any other color, if they were then they wouldn’t be colorless, they don’t sleep, and it makes no sense to speak of sleep as something one could do furiously.  Mere grammatical possibilities don’t by themselves entail anything about reality.

Similarly, we can stick an “s” on the end of the word “God” and then go on to ask questions like “How many Gods are there?”  But that doesn’t entail that it really makes sense to think of “Gods” as a class of things that might in theory have more than one member.  Again, in fact that makes no sense when we unpack the implications of what it is to be absolutely simple or non-composite, to be purely actual, and to have an essence identical to one’s existence.  It seems otherwise only if we confuse grammar with reality.

QUESTION (Paul Brandon Rimmer): There has been a new movement in Christian apologetics arguing for idealism, the idea that all of reality is made of minds, and that ultimately there is no such thing as matter. Is this consistent with Thomism? Is this consistent with Catholic doctrine? In each case, if not, what would have to be changed about Thomism/Catholic doctrine, in order to make room for idealism?

DR. FESER: It is not consistent with Thomism.  One reason is Thomism’s Aristotelian conception of matter as what limits form to a particular individual time and place and thus individuates instances of a species of thing.  If you have two or more stones, for example, then you need, in addition to what they have in common – the form of being stone – something to differentiate them, and that’s what matter does.  Different bits of matter instantiate the same form.  For the Thomist, then, it makes no sense to say “There are two stones, and neither one is material.”  Berkeley can say that (given his different conception of matter), but Aquinas cannot.

Furthermore, to get rid of matter you’d really be reducing all of reality to a collection of angelic minds – that is to say, minds which are of their very essence divorced from matter.  That would mean identifying human minds with angelic minds of a sort.  You’d be saying that we are essentially really minds without matter, and what seems to be the material world is really just a collection of our perceptions.  But for the Thomist, that cannot be right, because our minds are simply not like angelic intellects, as Aquinas understands them.  For example, angelic intellects don’t have a stream of sensory experiences, as we do.  Sensation is, for the Thomist, essentially bodily, so that what lacks a body lacks sensation.  For that reason, angels don’t acquire knowledge the way we do, by learning things from a series of sensory perceptions.  Their knowledge is “built in.” 

Neither is idealism compatible with Catholicism, for reasons that might be evident from what has been said already, because Catholic doctrine is deeply committed to the reality of the material world.  That is, for example, what the doctrine of the Incarnation is all about.  The Second Person of the Trinity became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, and if you say that the flesh was really just a collection of perceptions, it is hard to see how that avoids collapsing into Docetism. 

There is also the fact that modern idealism stems from general metaphysical and epistemological premises that Thomists regard as deeply mistaken.  Berkeley’s idealism is a byproduct of the modern empiricist reduction of concepts to mental images.  Leibniz’s idealism is a byproduct of his working within the Cartesian dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa.  But for the Thomist, these are just bad starting points, and in particular they get badly wrong both the nature of substance and the nature of our knowledge.

This is a large topic, and much more could be said.  Suffice it to say that the divergence between the views is so deep that there is no way to reconcile them, and for the Thomist there is no good reason to want to reconcile them, since idealism is (the Thomist would argue) riddled with philosophical and theological errors.

QUESTION (Camainc): How do you square divine simplicity with the personal God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures? Are the scriptural references to God changing his mind, getting angry, etc., just anthropomorphic?

DR. FESER: It depends on what you mean.  Take anger, for example.  If by anger you have in mind the way that we human beings go from a state of tranquility to a state of emotional agitation, then no, there is nothing like that in God.  The reason is that, for one thing, emotional states are bodily and God is immaterial.  For another thing, emotional fluctuations entail going from potential to actual, and there is no potentiality in God.  However, by anger you could mean the will to inflict a punishment on an evildoer.  And there is something like that in God. 

Here it is crucial to understand the differences between the univocal, metaphorical, and analogical uses of language, which I discuss in the book.  When we use terms univocally, we are using them in the same sense.  For Thomists and many other classical theists, theological language is not to be understood univocally.  Hence, when we say that Bob is angry and God is angry, we are not to be understood as attributing to God the exact same thing that Bob has. 

Are we speaking metaphorically or non-literally, then?  That depends.  If when saying “God is angry,” you mean that God feels highly agitated, then this cannot literally be true, and so at best could be a metaphor.

But if instead you mean “God intends to punish evildoers,” then this is not metaphorical, but literally true.  However, not all literal language is univocal.  Some of it is analogical.  For example, when I say that the cheeseburger I am eating is good and that the book I am reading is good, I am not using “good” in exactly the same sense – the goodness of a book and the goodness of food are very different – but I am not speaking metaphorically or non-literally either.  Rather, I am speaking analogically.  There is something in the goodness of a book that is analogous to the goodness of food, even if it is not the same thing.

Now, that, for the Thomist, is how to understand a claim like “God intends to punish evildoers.”  There is something in God that is analogous to what we call an intention to punish evildoers, even though in God it doesn’t involve the kind of thing that goes on when we have this intention.  (For example, we have fluctuating emotional states, we weigh various considerations when deciding whether to punish – which involves going from one thought to another, and thus actualizing potentialities – and so on, and none of that exists in God.)

So, some of the anthropomorphic attributes that scripture attributes to God are to be understood metaphorically, but by no means all of them are.  Some of them are to be understood in an analogical sense, which is a kind of literal sense.  The rule of thumb would be: If scripture attributes some bodily characteristic or emotional state to God, that is to be understood merely metaphorically or non-literally.  But if scripture attributes to God something having to do with intellect or will, then that is to be understood literally, though in an analogical sense (which is one kind of literal sense) rather than in a univocal sense.

QUESTION (Brian Seets): I am an atheist. I choose to do what I see as good. That is, I do nothing that could have a negative impact on others. I do this because I want to live in a world where that is the standard behavior and so that (I hope) others will choose to not negatively impact my life. What makes my choice less worthy than a Christian's? Doesn't living well without hope of reward or fear of punishment make God irrelevant?

DR. FESER: Unlike some other theists, I don’t myself think it is quite correct to say that morality could have no foundation on an atheistic conception of reality.  It’s a little more complicated than that.  What I would say is that the possibility of morality presupposes the reality of what Aristotelians call formal and final causes.  We have to be able to say that there is, as a matter of objective fact, such a thing as the nature or essence of a human being, and also that there is, as a matter of objective fact, such a thing as a set of final causes or ends or goals inherent in human nature, the realization of which defines what is good for us.

Now, in theory someone could accept this much while at the same time denying the existence of God.  For example, Thomas Nagel at least flirts with something like this metaphysical position in his book Mind and Cosmos.  For the Aristotelian and the Thomist, morality is grounded in human nature, and human nature would still be what it is, and still be knowable, even if per impossibile there were no God.  Hence, just as you can do chemistry and thereby discover the facts about the causal properties of sulfur, phosphorus, etc. whether or not you affirm the existence of a divine first cause, so too can you, at least to a large extent, know what is good or bad for human beings just by studying human nature.  For morality is not about arbitrary divine commands, but is, again, grounded in human nature.

However, it is also true that this is an unstable position.  Just as, for the Thomist, causality is only ultimately intelligible if there is a divine uncaused cause (for reasons I set out in Five Proofs), so too, final causality ultimately makes sense only if there is a divine intellect which directs things toward their natural ends or goals (for reasons set out in Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which I have defended at length in a couple of places, though it’s not an argument that is covered in Five Proofs).  Still, the issues can be distinguished.  The question “Is there final causality in nature?” is one thing, and the question “Does all final causality presuppose the existence of God?” is another.  If you could defend a Yes answer to the first question while at the same time defending a No answer to the second – and some people have, historically, tried to do this (even if, in my view, such a project at the end of the day won’t work) – then you could have a foundation for morality while avoiding theism.

But very few atheists are willing to do this.  Most of them reject the whole idea of formal and final causality, along with theism.  That is part of the general package of modern philosophical naturalism, even if in theory one could adopt some alternative atheist metaphysics.  And if you reject the whole idea of final causality or teleology, then I think you will not be able to give any rational foundation for morality.  This isn’t a topic I get into in Five Proofs, though I have addressed it elsewhere.  (See my book Neo-Scholastic Essays for treatment of some of the issues I’ve been referring to, such as the foundations of morality and Aquinas’s Fifth Way.)

Now, does that mean that someone who is both an atheist and rejects the whole idea of final causes or purposes in human nature will in fact be without any moral virtue?  Of course not.  Many atheists have many admirable character traits.  But that is not the point.  The question is not whether atheists will in fact sometimes do the right thing – of course they will – but rather whether they can give a rational philosophical justification of morality in the context of a naturalistic metaphysics.  And that, I would argue, is not possible.

In a few days, Dr. Edward Feser will release his newest book, titled Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press, 2017).

You probably know Dr. Feser from his sharply reasoned posts here at Strange Notions, or from his popular blog, which mainly focuses on the philosophy of religion.

Dr. Feser is the author of several acclaimed books, including:

• Neo-Scholastic Essays (St. Augustine's Press, 2015)
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions, 2014)
• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine's Press, 2010)
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2009)
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide) (Oneworld Publications, 2006)

Dr. Feser is a Thomistic philosopher, meaning he specializes in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and has written extensively on Aquinas' Five Ways (or five proofs) to God.

But in his new book, he examines several more arguments. Here's a brief summary:

Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.
 
This book also offers a detailed treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.
 
This book offers as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past—thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others—that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism which gives aid and comfort to atheism.

Since these are all topics we discuss and debate regularly here on Strange Notions, I reached out to Dr. Feser and asked if he'd be willing to do an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our site, answering whatever questions we threw at him. Thankfully, he accepted!

So just type your question below in the comment box, and over the next few days we'll select a handful. Dr. Feser will then share his answers here within the next couple weeks.

We'd especially love to hear from skeptics and atheists. So whether you doubt natural theology is even a legitimate discipline, or you think it's impossible to prove God, or whether you have a specific question about a particular proof, we want to hear from you!

What would you ask a Catholic philosopher about proofs of God?

We especially want to hear questions related to proofs for God's existence, and again we'd love to hear from skeptics or atheists. But everyone is welcome to submit questions. They don't have to be challenges or "gotcha" questions—in fact, we discourage those. We're mostly interested in sincere, curious questions.

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A couple weeks ago, we launched an #AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Dr. Brant Pitre, who is one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars. His latest book, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016) seeks to debunk skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

Hundred of questions poured in and Brant answered as many as he could, sometimes grouping them together where the topics overlapped. Today we share his responses. Enjoy!
 

The Literacy of the Evangelists

Mike: Where/how did the gospel writers learn to write in Greek when they apparently spoke Aramaic and weren't educated men?

Brant Pitre: Great question! First, although a hundred years ago it was widely assumed that all first-century Palestinian Jews spoke only Aramaic, more recent scholarship has shown that the the linguistic situation in first-century Palestine was (at least) trilingual: there is evidence of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic being spoken (see e.g., Stanley Porter).

Second, as Richard Bauckham and other scholars have pointed out, although four of the apostles were “uneducated” fishermen (cf. Acts 4:13), at least one of the apostles was literate: Matthew, the tax-collector, who would have had to be able write tax-documents, probably in both Aramaic and Greek (cf. Matt 9:9; 10:3).

Moreover, from a historical perspective, the illiteracy of the Twelve apostles is largely irrelevant, since of course two of the four Gospels—Mark and Luke—are not even attributed to apostles, but to followers of Peter and Paul. There is certainly no reason to doubt that Luke or Mark could speak and write in Greek, and external evidence as early as Papias of Hierapolis (who knew the apostles personally) is clear that Mark acted as Peter’s scribe or interpreter while he was in Rome.

What about the apostle John? I see no reason to doubt that John was in fact “illiterate” (Acts 4:13). However, after decades of evangelization in Greek cities of Asia Minor, even if John couldn’t write in Greek himself, he could easily have ‘composed’ his gospel by dictating it to a secretary (or ‘amanuensis’) as even literate writers such as Paul, Cicero, and Titus Caesar (!) were known to have done (cf. Rom 16:22; Suetonius, Divus Titus 3.2). In fact, some ancient external evidence claims John’s Gospel was in fact dictated. For more on this, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 1-3.

Eyewitnesses to Jesus? The Memories of Jesus’ Students

Jim Jones: Name one person who met Jesus, spoke to him, saw him, or heard him and who wrote about the event, has a name, and is documented outside of the Bible (or any other gospels).

Brant Pitre: I’ll name two: (1) Matthaios, commonly known as “Matthew,” who was a Jewish tax-collector in Galilee who became one of Jesus’ mathetai or “students,” (commonly known as “disciples”) and was chosen by Jesus as one of the Twelve apostles (see Matt 9:9; 10:1-3); and (2) Iōannēs, commonly known as “John,” who was a Galilean fisherman who also became one of Jesus’ students and was a member of the Twelve (Mark 3:16-19; 14:17-25). According to the unanimous internal evidence of all extant ancient Greek manuscripts (e.g., Papyrus 4, 64, 66, 75, Codex Sinaticius, Vaticanus, etc.) as well as the unanimous external evidence of ancient writers outside the Bible (e.g., Papias of Hierapolis, Irenaeus of Lyons, Muratorian Canon, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, etc.), two of the four gospels were authored by Matthew and John (although Greek Matthew was universally regarded as a translation of a Semitic original).

In fact, the Gospel of John itself explicitly states that it was “written” by the Beloved Disciple, an eyewitness to Jesus who was present at the crucifixion (John 21:20-24, cf. 19:35). As Jesus’ Jewish students, Matthew and John not only would have “met Jesus, spoke to him, saw him and heard him,” they would have lived with Jesus for up to three years, traveling with him everywhere and listening to him teach on a daily basis.

It’s not only Christian sources that attribute the Gospels to eyewitnesses. Even Celsus, the famous 2^nd century pagan apologist and critic of Christianity, could not deny the fact that the Gospels were written by “Jesus’ own pupils and hearers” who left behind “their reminiscences of Jesus in writing” (Origen, Contra Celsus 2.13). Now, one can of course claim that the disciples were liars—and Celsus did—but there is not a shred of text-critical evidence that the Gospels were ever anonymous and no positive historical evidence attributing them to anyone but the apostles and their companions. For more on this topic, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 2-4.

Are the Gospels Biographies?

Jim: To my understanding, there is now reasonable scholarly consensus that the Gospels are best understood as belonging to the genre of bioi or Graeco-Roman biography. First of all, do you agree that this is a correct and useful classification? If so, what are some of the most noteworthy differences between that genre and the genre of modern historical biography? In particular, what liberties might we reasonably expect authors of bioi to take that a modern biographer would not, and what are some of the literary devices might we expect authors of bioi to use that modern biographers would not?

Brant Pitre: Yes, you are right about the scholarly consensus that the Gospels are ancient biographies or “lives” (Greek bioi), especially since the work of the British scholar Richard Burridge’s ground-breaking book, What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography (2004). And yes, I think this consensus is correct. With that said, there are some important differences between modern biographies and ancient forms of biography like the gospels, or Plutarch’s or Suetonius’ “lives,” that we should keep in mind:

1. Order: ancient biographies don’t have to be in strict chronological order, but can be more thematically arranged;
2. Length: ancient biographies are often fairly brief, averaging between 10,000 and 20,000 words;
3. Selectivity: ancient biographies often emphasize that they aren’t telling you everything about their subject (see e.g., John 21:25; Lucian Life of Demonax, 67; Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 1.1). They tend to selective rather than comprehensive.
4. Exactitude: ancient biographers are not purporting to give verbatim “transcripts” of what a person has said or done, but rather the “general sense” of what was “really said” (cf. Thucydides, History, 1.22.1)
5. Supernaturalism: ancient biographers—in contrast to modern naturalistic historiography—had no qualms about recording purportedly supernatural events in the life of the subject (e.g., the miracles of Jesus).

Finally, it’s important to remember that just because the Gospels are biographies does not mean that they are verbatim “transcripts” of what Jesus did and said. For more on the Gospels as biographies, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 6.

Fact, Symbolism, and Allegory?

VicqRuiz: Dr. Pitre, upon reading the Biblical account of an event, how to you determine whether it is (1) a factual account of something that happened in history as described, (2) a retelling of an actual event perhaps containing some symbolic or allegorical elements, or (3) a purely allegorical story designed only to explain a deeper truth?

Brant Pitre: The first and most important task in this regard is to establish the literary genre of a book. This means asking questions like: What kind of book is this? What are the closest ancient parallels in form and contents? What kind of book did ancient people think this was? And what did the ancient author think he or she was writing? What are the author’s intentions and the audiences’ expectations? Is the author intending to record a historical event? Or is the author intending to compose poetry, allegory, prophecy, parable, or midrash, etc.?

As I try to show in The Case for Jesus, a close comparison with ancient Greco-Roman biography shows that the literary genre of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is closest to ancient biographies (see above). To be sure, the gospels contain micro-genres such as parables, allegories, hyperbole, etc. For example, the parable of the Sower is clearly presented as an allegory which needs to be explained by Jesus to the disciples (Mark 4:1-20). But the macro-genre of the Gospels is closest to biography.

Moreover, I also show that the Gospels are not just any kind of biographies, but historical biographies, in which an ancient author shows an express concern for historical truth: as Josephus puts it in his biography of himself: “veracity” is “incumbent upon the historian” (Josephus, Life, 336-39). In other words, whether or not you believe their claims, the evangelists intend to relate accounts of actual events and even explicitly claim to be recording what Jesus actually “did” and said, based on the “testimony” of “eyewitnesses (Greek autoptai) from the beginning” (see Luke 1:1-4; John 19:35; 21:24-25). They do not see themselves as composing“folklore” or “myths” (Greek mythos) (cf. 1 Tim 3:4; 2 Pet 1:16). This just isn’t the right genre.

This does not of course mean that the gospels are “verbatim transcripts” of Jesus’ teachings, nor do they claim to be. But again, according to ancient standards, history should adhere “as closely as possible” to the “general sense” of what was “really said” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.1). For more on this, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 6.

What about “Q” and the Order of the Gospels?

Bdlaacmm: Dr. Pitre, Does it matter which Gospel was written first? I often hear people say such-and-such a Gospel was the first written and therefore the "most reliable" (which in itself is kind of interesting, since no one today thinks a book written about WWII in 1946 is for that reason more reliable than one written in, say, 1985 - in fact, usually it's the reverse). The downside of such thinking is that anything in the other three Gospels is then downplayed or even "suspect". At this point, is it even possible to determine the order of composition?

Arthur Jeffries: What is your view on the existence of "Q"? Mark Goodacre, Michael Goulder, and other scholars have argued against its existence, mostly in academic papers (though several books have also been written). However, the consensus seemingly remains unchanged.

Brant Pitre: For well over a decade, I was a diehard “Q believer.” My first book on Jesus was even written using Q as a working hypothesis. Then I read Mark Goodacre’s 2002 book The Case against Q, and it changed my mind. I for one am troubled by the fact that Q only exists in the imagination of scholars; no manuscript has ever been found, and no ancient Christian ever refers to such a book. Even more importantly, as Goodacre shows, there is compelling evidence that Luke both knew and used Matthew’s Gospel, and if that is the case, then the need for Q simply vanishes.

With that said, over the years, as I have continued to study the Synoptic Problem, I have frankly become more cautious and agnostic about ever unraveling the precise literary relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I agree with what the great scholar Joseph Fitzmyer stated some decades ago: the Synoptic Problem is “practically insoluble.” We simply may not have enough data to solve the complex question of literary order and relationship.

In any case, from the perspective of the quest for the historical Jesus, it’s important to remember that the literary question of the relationship between the Gospels (who copied from whom?) is just not as important as the historical question of authorship (who wrote the gospels?) and date (when were they written? within the lifetime of Jesus’ disciples?)

Think about it: if Mark is actually based on the eyewitness testimony of Peter, for basic historical questions, does it really matter who copied from whom? And if Matthew is really written by one of the apostles, for basic historical questions, does it really matter if he copied from Mark? And by the way—as I show in the book—the old argument that an eyewitness like Matthew would never use a non-eyewitness like Mark as a source is bogus. We have evidence of exactly that taking place amongst students of Socrates (cf. Hermogenes, Plato, and Xenophon).

In sum, all of the actual historical evidence we possess points to the Gospels being first-century biographies written within the living memory of the events by apostles and their followers. That is what matters most for those of us interested in the historical quest for Jesus. For more on Q, the Synoptic Problem, and the first-century dating of the Gospels, see The Case for Jesus, chapter 7.

Did Jesus Fulfill the Jewish Prophecies?

David Nickol: Did Jesus fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah? If the answer in Dr. Pitre's book is "yes," what are the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled? Also, what does it mean to "fulfill" a prophecy? Perhaps a better question would be, "What was predicted or foretold in the Old Testament about Jesus?" Or were the "prophecies" outside (and after) the Old Testament? (The word Messiah is not found in the Old Testament.)

GuineaPigDan: I guess I'll give one a shot. How come prophecies of Jesus weren't more specific, like just plainly saying "your Messiah will be Yeshua, born around 4BC and is also the 2nd Person of the Trinity and will be crucified, resurrected and end sacrifices." Having the Jews develop one idea of the Messiah but then suddenly told, "Psych! This other person was the Messiah" is a bit like reading a mystery novel where the reader didn't get a chance to guess the ending on their own.

Brant Pitre: These are both great questions. A whole book could be written on Jesus and Jewish prophecy; for now, just a couple of quick points.

First, David, I’m sorry to say that someone has misinformed you about the word “messiah” (Hebrew mashiach). This word is used dozens of times in the Old Testament—usually as a title for the “anointed” king (for example, see 1 Sam 2:10, 16:6; Ps 2:2; 89:39). Moreover, it actually occurs in the most explicit prophecy about the coming death of a future “messiah” (Hebrew mashiach) that we possess (Daniel 9:25-27).

And intriguingly—to answer your question, GuineaPigDan—this prophecy in Daniel 9 not only proclaims that the messiah will one day come and be killed, it actually foretells when this will take place: namely, some 490 years after the “going forth of the word” to restore and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple and before a final future destruction of the “sanctuary” and the city, in which “sacrifice and offering” will “cease” (Daniel 9:25-27). (Note the reference to the future ‘end’ of ‘sacrifice’ you mentioned.)

Indeed, as the first-century historian Josephus tells us, that is one reason the book of Daniel was so popular among first-century Jews, because Daniel gave a timeline for the fulfillment of his prophecies (Josephus, Ant. 10.267-68). A solid case then can be made that Daniel’s prophecies were expected by ancient Jews to be fulfilled sometime in the first century A.D.

Second, the book of Daniel wasn’t just a favorite among many ancient Jews; it seems to have been one of Jesus’ favorites as well. If you read the Synoptic Gospels carefully, you will see that Jesus’ two most frequently used expressions are (1) “the kingdom of God” and (2) “the Son of man.” Where does he get these expressions? Above all, from the book of Daniel’s oracles about the future coming of the “kingdom” of “God” (Daniel 2) and the coming of the heavenly “Son of man” (Daniel 7). Significantly, the earliest first-century Jewish interpretations of Daniels’ “Son of man” identify him as the Messiah (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra). Once this is clear, Jesus' use of this expression to refer to himself becomes even more striking, since our earliest Jewish interpreters of Daniel also identified the fourth kingdom with the Roman empire. In other words, according to Daniel 2 and 7, the kingdom of God and the messianic Son of Man were expected to come not just ‘one day’ but sometime during the reign of the Roman empire.

So, GuineaPigDan, some prophecies are more vague, but some prophecies are quite specific—and it’s precisely these prophecies from the book of Daniel that Jesus chooses to refer to himself and to the kingdom he is bringing.

These aren’t, of course, the only kinds of “prophecies” Jesus sets out to fulfill. Jesus also engages in prophetic signs and actions that hearken back to the Old Testament, in which he ‘reenacts’ certain events from Jewish Scripture like the divine revelation of the name “I am” to Moses (see Mark 6) or the Cry of Dereliction from Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (see Mark 15), but reconfigures them around himself. This kind of fulfillment is more commonly referred to as typology or recapitulation.

There’s so much more to say. Put it this way: pretty much the entire second half of my book is devoted to examining Jesus, Jewish prophecy, and biblical typology. After reading, I don't think you’ll walk away thinking that “the Jews” had “one idea of the Messiah” and that Jesus had another. Check it out for yourself and see what you think of the evidence. See The Case for Jesus, chapters 8, 9, 11-12.

Was Jesus Wrong about the “End of the World”?

LanDroid: Huston Smith, in his classic book The World's Religions, wrote, "We know almost nothing about (Jesus); and of the little we know, what is most certain is that he was wrong—this last referred to his putative belief that the world would quickly come to an end." There are several passages where Jesus warns that some in his audience would see the kingdom of God in their lifetime. What are we to make of these incorrect predictions 2,000+ years later?

Brant Pitre: Important question, LanDroid. First, although I don’t go into this particular issue in The Case for Jesus, I’ve written a whole book on the Olivet Discourse (2005) and a lengthy article on Jesus’ prophecies of the destruction of Temple and the end of the world for the new Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (eds. Joel B. Green et al., IVP Academic, 2014, pp. 23-33). In that piece, I show that Jesus can’t have been “wrong” about the end of the world, since he expressly states that although “heaven and earth will pass away,” “not even the Son” knows “the day or the hour” (Mark 13:32).

Second, I find it fascinating that your question assumes that “the kingdom of God” is identical to the “end of the world.” What makes you think that? As I show in The Case for Jesus, when Jesus speaks about the Son of man and the kingdom of God, he is principally alluding to the book of Daniel, in which the “kingdom of God” does not refer to the “end of the world,” but the coming of a heavenly kingdom which will arrive sometime during the Roman empire, begin small like a little “stone”, and then spread throughout the world to become a great “mountain” (Daniel 2). In Daniel, the kingdom of God is a mysterious kingdom that has its origins in heaven but spreads throughout the whole world on earth while being ruled from heaven by the mysterious “Son of man.” This future kingdom will be ruled over by the heavenly being who is “like a Son of man” (Daniel 7) and who was identified as the “Messiah” by first century Jews (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra).

In other words, far from showing that Jesus was “wrong” about the coming of the kingdom of God, I try to show that his prediction that the kingdom would come within the lifetime of his disciples is in fact precisely what happened. But people often misunderstand what the kingdom is. Albert Schweitzer’s great mistake was to collapse the kingdom of God and the “end of the world” into one as if they were two ways of talking about the same thing. See The Case for Jesus, chapter 8.

The Divinity of Jesus

Jason Sylly Crabtree: I'm an atheist. I believe Jesus existed, but what real support is there to the claim of his divinity (inside, and especially outside the Bible)?

Brant Pitre: This question is really at the heart of my new book. There’s no way to do it justice here. But I’ll say this: You’re probably familiar with the now common idea that Jesus only claims to be divine in the (later) Gospel of John, but not in the (earlier) Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I spend three chapters in the book showing that Jesus does claim to be divine in the Synoptic Gospels, but he does it in a very Jewish way: using riddles, parables, and, most of all, allusions to the Jewish Scriptures to both conceal his divine identity from his opponents and reveal it to his companions and those who “have the ears to hear.” I look at six or seven episodes, but here I’ll just pick one: in Mark 14, Jesus is handed over by the Sanhedrin to the Romans to be crucified under the charge of “blasphemy.” Now, despite what many Christians assume, it wasn’t blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah. How else would you know who the king was? But it was blasphemy to claim to be divine.

And so the question is this: If Jesus isn’t claiming to be divine, then why is he charged with blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity? Far from not claiming to be divine in the Synoptic Gospels, the climax of these Gospels is precisely the explosive divine claims of Jesus and his subsequent execution. In other words, to answer your question: ‘What real support is there for the divinity of Jesus?’ There are four first-century biographies agreeing that Jesus speaks and acts as if he were divine and that he was in fact charged with blasphemy because of who he claimed to be.

What about the Resurrection?

Ignatius Reilly: The only evidence we have that [Jesus' resurrection] is historical in Mark is that a few women found an empty tomb. Maybe it was the wrong one. We also have the fact that nobody expected Jesus to rise, even though Jesus supposedly kept telling them his plan. The suggestion that the disciples did not understand Jesus when he told them about his resurrection seems like a way of covering over an inconvenient historical fact.

Rick Bateman: Why did the disciples/apostles wait until after Jesus had ascended to heaven to start preaching that he had risen? Wouldn’t it have been far more effective to start preaching while he was still around? For that matter, why didn’t Jesus continue preaching while he was still around (to anyone but the disciples)? For that matter, why did Jesus leave at all? Doesn’t it seem just a little convenient, not unlike the kind of explanations they might’ve come up with later if he hadn’t really come back to life at all?

Brant Pitre: These are great questions, and I can’t do them justice here. But I think they’re related, so I’ll try to make a couple of quick points to consider.

First, Ignatius, it’s simply not true that the “only evidence” for the resurrection we possess is the empty tomb in Mark. The empty tomb is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the early Christian belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (since, obviously, tombs can get emptied in lots of ways besides resurrection.) As I noted above in the question on the literary genre and authorship of the Gospels, we have four first-century biographies of Jesus—attributed either to the apostles or their followers—that testify that (1) Jesus died and was buried, (2) the tomb was empty on Easter Sunday, (3) Jesus appeared on multiple occasions in his body to his disciples (including Matthew and John, to whom two of the four Gospels are attributed (see Matt 28; Mark 16:1-9; Luke 24; John 20-21).

Now, you can say that they’re all lying (as you suggest they may be), but you can’t claim we don’t have any evidence. Sure, it’s theoretically possible that all four authors are ‘covering up an inconvenient fact’, but it also possible (and I would argue much more plausible) that the disciples of Jesus really didn’t understand (or believe) what Jesus meant when he said he would die and rise again. After all, as dense as the disciples sometimes were, even they knew that ordinarily, dead people stay dead.

Second, Rick, the question of why Jesus doesn’t have the apostles start preaching before he ascends seems to be answered in the Gospels of Luke and John, which not only depict the apostles as too afraid for their own skins to go out and preach, but in which Jesus also spends those 40 days instructing the disciples about the mysteries of the kingdom and preparing them to be his “witnesses” (John 20; Luke 4).

Likewise, the question of why Jesus left all is a great question. It revolves very clearly about the meaning of the Ascension. Unfortunately, I don’t get into the Ascension much in the book. From one angle, it does indeed seem ‘convenient’ as you put it, if your goal is to cover up the fact that Jesus’ corpse was really mouldering somewhere in a tomb and never really raised. (So I ask you what I asked Ignatius: Do you think all four biographies of Jesus—including the two attributed to eyewitnesses—are deliberately deceiving their readers? If so, what’s your evidence?)

On the other hand, I would suggest that you consider the possibility that Jesus ascends into heaven precisely to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel, in which the “Son of man” ascends to the Ancient of Days to take his seat on a heavenly throne (contrary to what many assume, as James Dunn points out, the “Son of man” in Daniel 7 is ‘ascending’, not ‘descending’). It is, after all, the kingdom of “heaven.” But this doesn’t mean that Jesus ‘leaves’ (as you put it). Indeed, the whole account of the Road to Emmaus shows that the risen Jesus remains with his disciples in “the breaking of the bread.” (For more on this, see my 2011 book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.)

In the final analysis, it seems clear that throughout his public ministry and into his resurrection and beyond, Jesus does not go around shoving the mystery of his identity down people’s throats. To the contrary, he invites people to answer the question for themselves: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29). In other words, he respects the freedom of his disciples and he wants them to trust him. In other words, he is not only giving motives of credibility (miracles, teaching, resurrection, etc.) for believing him (cf. John 10:38), he ultimately wants to call people to trust him, even when they can’t fully comprehend everything he says and does. This, of course, is what Christianity has traditionally referred to as “faith,” and this kind of trust is an essential part of any healthy relationship, including (and perhaps especially) a relationship with God. For more on the resurrection, history and faith, see The Case for Jesus, chapters 12-13.

In a few days, Dr. Brant Pitre, one of today's premier Catholic biblical scholars, will release a new book titled The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Random House, 2016). It seeks to debunk many skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels put forward today by scholars such as Bart Ehrman.

Here's a brief summary:

For well over a hundred years now, many scholars have questioned the historical truth of the Gospels, claiming that they were originally anonymous. Others have even argued that Jesus of Nazareth did not think he was God and never claimed to be divine.

In The Case for Jesus, Dr. Brant Pitre, the bestselling author of Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, goes back to the sources—the biblical and historical evidence for Christ—in order to answer several key questions, including:
 

• Were the four Gospels really anonymous?
• Are the Gospels folklore? Or are they biographies?
• Were the four Gospels written too late to be reliable?
• What about the so-called “Lost Gospels,” such as “Q” and the Gospel of Thomas?
• Did Jesus claim to be God?
• Is Jesus divine in all four Gospels? Or only in John?
• Did Jesus fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah?
• Why was Jesus crucified?
• What is the evidence for the Resurrection?

As The Case for Jesus will show, recent discoveries in New Testament scholarship, as well as neglected evidence from ancient manuscripts and the early church fathers, together have the potential to pull the rug out from under a century of skepticism toward the traditional Gospels. Above all, Pitre shows how the divine claims of Jesus of Nazareth can only be understood by putting them in their ancient Jewish context.

Since these are all questions we discuss and debate regularly here on Strange Notions, I reached out to Brant and asked if he'd be willing to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our site, answering whatever questions we threw at him. Thankfully, he accepted!

He's particularly interested in hearing from skeptics and atheists. So whether you doubt Jesus was a real historical person, or that the New Testament offers reliable testimony, or whether the earliest Christians really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, we want to hear from you!

What question would you ask a Catholic Biblical scholar?

What makes you most skeptical about Jesus or the Bible? What's that query you've posed to Christians and never received a good answer?

Again, we're particular interested in questions from skeptics or atheists, but everyone is welcome to submit questions. And they don't have to be challenges or "gotcha" questions. We're interested in plain old curiosity questions, too.

(It should go without saying, but if your question is disrespectful or snarky, it won't be chosen.)

Just type your question below in the comment box, and over the next few days we'll select a handful. Brant will then share his answers here within the next 1-2 weeks. Thanks!