Pints With Aquinas - 80: Edward Feser Continues to Refute Richard Dawkins' objections to Aquinas' 5 ways

Episode Date: November 14, 2017

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Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. I'm Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with St. Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Today we're going to be talking about the final two ways of St. Thomas Aquinas. More to the point, we're going to be talking about what Richard Dawkins has to say about these final two proofs for God's existence. And joining around the bar table with us once again is Thomist philosopher Edward Fazer. Really happy to have him on the show. I hope everyone enjoyed last week's episode. If you haven't yet listened to last week's episode,

be sure to go and do that before listening to this one. Enjoy the show. All right, all right, all right. Good to have you back here at Pints with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. Thanks very much for tuning in week after week to Pints with Aquinas. Good to have you with us. Last week, I told you we'll be running a raffle.

Last week and this week. So this is the last week we're running that raffle. I've got three different prizes that I want to give away. One is a five-volume set of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. I will post it to you. This will run you around $300 if you were to buy it brand new. So that's pretty cool. Secondly, I'm going to be giving away two other prizes and that's a copy of Edward Faze's new book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God. So

three winners are going to win. Okay. So the way you would enter the raffle is by going to Pints with Aquinas and the top blog post there, you'll see that is the post where you go in there, you enter, you give me your email and stuff so I know how to contact you when you win or if you win, rather, I should say. So that's pretty cool. Huh? Huh? Yes.

Also, a couple of other things I want to tell you about. You know, we have a great Facebook page. We've got a great group of people discussing all things Aquinas, so just type in Pints with Aquinas into Facebook and you can join that group. We've got a great Twitter page. So basically twice a day, I post quotations from Thomas Aquinas. So if you want a bite-sized morsel of Thomas Aquinas a couple of times every day, you could follow us on Pints with Aquinas. So yeah, what are you drinking tonight? I'm drinking Barrel Bourbon by, again, our good Protestant listener and Patreon supporter, Brian McCaffrey. Brian,

you rock. Thank you very much for sending me this. I'm almost at the bottom of it. It's really terrific. Okay, so today, as I said, we're going to be looking at Dawkins' quote-unquote refutation of the final two ways of St. Thomas Aquinas. Then we're going to be looking at Dawkins' quote-unquote refutation of the final two ways of St. Thomas Aquinas. Then we're going to be looking at Dawkins' central argument. That's what he calls it in his book, The God Delusion. So in a sense, his entire book, right, in as much as it's an argument for atheism, is going to depend on this central argument. And I think you'll see, it's really not difficult to refute. William Lane Craig has had a good crack at this, and he's got this great quote about Dawkins'

argument. Let's know what he says. He says, several years ago, my atheist colleague, Quentin Smith, unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawkins' argument against God in a brief history of time as the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought. With the advent of the God delusion, the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins' ascension to the throne. Richard Dawkins' ascension to the throne. Really well put. And I think you're going to recognize very quickly and clearly after the end of this episode why that is true. Enjoy the show. And as always, stick around for the end of the episode where I'll be answering some of your questions. Here we go. Well, let's quickly take a look at these final two responses to Aquinas' five ways, the fourth and the fifth, the argument from degree and the teleological argument, or the argument from design. So he says, regarding the argument

from degree, this is how he summarizes it. We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection, but we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection and we call that maximum god and then he says that's an argument you might as well say people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore, there must exist a preeminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.

Right. So let's comment on this. Now, first thing to say, you know, let me say two, well, not exactly positive things about Dawkins, but to give him his due here, here's one of those cases where rhetorically he shows himself to be quite skillful. It's a nice little paragraph there that no doubt has raised in many readers the sort of content for Aquinas that Dawkins is trying to generate. So rhetorically, it's effective. I'll give him that. And then I'll also give him one other thing, which is that anyone reading the fourth way, the fourth of Aquinas' way for the first time, who doesn't really know anything about Aquinas' general philosophy might reasonably infer that Aquinas

is talking about, you know, that what Aquinas has to say would apply to things like smelliness and so forth. So I'll give, you know, Dawkins a break on that to some extent. The problem, though, comes in here that it's one thing if some person who doesn't claim to know anything about Aquinas reads the fourth way and thinks, well, gee, what is Aquinas saying here? I mean, would he have to say also that, you know, there must be a greatest conceivable smelly thing and so forth? That seems weird. That seems ridiculous. Okay. But Dawkins goes far beyond that. I mean, Dawkins presents himself as somebody who doesn't know what he's talking about and can, as he put it earlier in the section here, that he can easily

expose Aquinas' views as vacuous. Now, if you're going to make that kind of bold claim, and you're going to go on about how stupid religious people are and how silly arguments for religion are, you'd better be sure you know what you're talking about. Even for the sake of your own ego. Like, if I was going to write a book on biology, I would want to share it with people who actually know what they're talking about in regards to biology, because I don't want to look like an idiot. Absolutely, that's right. So in Dawkins' case, you know, he ought to be held to, it's not even a particularly high standard, I mean, he ought to be held just to the standard of doing his homework before he comments on

Aquinas. And once again, he hasn't done it. You might not get this from that passage, the fourth way considered in isolation, but you certainly would know if you've read commentary on the fourth way and tried to make a good faith effort to understand what Aquinas is doing here, that the reasoning that he deploys there would not in fact apply to things like smelliness and the like. He's not even trying to give an argument that would have that implication. What he's talking about here, and this is something I discussed at length in my book on Aquinas, he's talking about what medieval philosophers called the transcendental attributes of reality. He's talking in particular about things like being,

truth, goodness, and so forth. Some people would throw in beauty there, right? That's a more controversial one. And the idea is that if we're talking about the different degrees in which a thing might have being or reality, right? And for ancient medieval philosophers, we ought to think of being or reality as something that comes in degrees. That might sound odd. Some people might think, well, isn't reality kind of an on-off switch? Something's either real or it's not. Well, Aquinas and earlier thinkers like Plato and Aristotle would not agree with that. They'd say, well, no, look, I mean, there is a clear sense in which things can have different degrees of reality or being. A shadow, for example, this is a kind of example Plato liked to use. A shadow

has a kind of reality, but it's not the same kind of reality or degree of reality as the object that's casting the shadow, because there's a kind of asymmetry here. If, let's say, a tree is casting a shadow, the shadow will exist only insofar as the tree exists to cast the shadow, but the tree would still exist even if the shadow did not, even if it were so surrounded by light that it didn't cast any shadow. So a shadow is real, but as a kind of derivative reality. Okay. And then another way that things might have degrees of reality is one thing might exist, but only in a contingent way. It depends on other things. Whereas another thing might exist in a, in a necessary way. It not only exists, but could not fail to exist and depends on nothing else for its existence. So these are some examples that illustrate the idea that things might come

in degrees of being or degrees of reality. And then things might also come in degrees of goodness. That's a more obvious and commonsensical way in which something might exist in degrees. And so Aquinas is focusing this argument only on these, what are called these transcendental attributes of being. Goodness, being a reality, truth, and so forth. And he's saying that those attributes come in degrees, but make sense only if there's something that is the maximum of each of those categories, something that has the maximal degree of reality, the maximal degree of goodness, the maximal degree of truth. And then medieval philosophers also argued that these transcendentals, as they're called, are convertible, meaning they're really all the

same thing looked at from different points of view, that goodness and truth and being a reality and beauty, some would throw in, are really the same thing looked at from different points of view, or it's the same one reality to which we apply different concepts. But it's only these transcendentals that he's tracing up to an absolute maximum. He's not talking about things like smelliness or redness or greenness or roundness or any of these other kinds of features of reality. So the argument properly understood is not really open to the kind of objection that Dawkins raises against it. So once again, he just, he hasn't done his homework. Okay, thank you. And here's the final one, the teleological argument. And this is, again,

when you said earlier that Dawkins seems to think that everyone's a prefigurement of Paley. He seems to think that Aquinas is making the uh the watchmaker argument or finding a watch in the sand rather argument uh he says this is what he says a theological argument um things in this world especially living things look as though they have been designed nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed therefore there must have been a designer and we call him god aquinas himself used the analogy of an arrow moving towards a target, but a modern heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile would have suited his purpose better. He's probably right regarding that last point, but anyway.

Yeah, well, so, and then, as you know, he continues in the next paragraph to say that this is really the same sort of argument that Paley would later give, and he goes on about complexity and elegance and so forth, and then suggests that Darwin's account of evolution by natural selection is a better explanation. Blows it out of the water. Blows out of the water, that's right, yeah. So, okay, so the problem with this is that he's assimilating Aquinas' fifth way to Paley's argument, and they're just not the same argument in several respects. For one thing, Aquinas' argument has nothing whatsoever to do with complexity, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with biology specifically. And it has nothing whatsoever to do, in fact, with very complex examples of purpose. But even the most rudimentary sort of purpose or goal-directedness in nature would, in Aquinas' view, be sufficient. So,

you know, what Aquinas is appealing to here is the idea of final cause, as Aristotle understood it. And that would be maybe best illustrated to a first approximation by something like the way that an acorn points beyond itself toward the end state or outcome of becoming a tree, say. But final causes, Aquinas understands, it can exist in even far more rudimentary things. So an example I like to use sometimes is the way that the phosphorus in the head of a match has, by virtue of its chemistry, a tendency to generate flame and heat when you strike the match. As long as the match hasn't been damaged by submerging it in water, say, and you strike that match, it's going to generate flame and heat. You might say that the phosphorus in the matchhead points or aims beyond itself toward that end state.

But that's a pretty simple kind of cause and effect pattern. It doesn't have anything to do with the way that, for example, the different parts of the eyeball have to be arranged just so if an organism is going to be able to see, or the different organic systems within a living thing have to function just the way if the organism is going to survive and reproduce. It's nothing as fancy as that. In fact, for Aquinas, anywhere in nature that you find even the most rudimentary kind of cause and effect, even if it's just if it's one particle knocking into another particle the way that ancient atomists thought that all

physical causation ultimately worked, that would be enough for Aquinas' purpose. If A regularly generates B as an efficient cause, that can only be because generating B is the final cause or outcome that A naturally points to. Okay. So it has nothing to do with complexity and it has nothing at all to do with biology. That's why Darwin's account of evolution by natural selection is just completely irrelevant to the fifth way. As a matter of fact, it would even for Aquinas be an example of the very sort of thing that he's talking about. Because when you talk about evolution, you talk about genetic mutations, you talk about natural selection operating on those traits that are either advantageous or not, and so forth, you're talking about

cause and effect regularities in nature. And any time you have a cause and effect regularities in nature. And anytime you have a cause and effect regularity, a regularity in efficient cause, A regularly generates B. For Aquinas, that entails a final cause. A naturally points to B as its natural outcome. So far from Darwinism being a challenge to the fifth way, for Aquinas, okay, it's just one more example of others of what I'm talking about, namely causal regularities that point to final causality. It's got nothing to do with complexity, nothing to do with biology, and it also has nothing to do with probabilities, weighing probabilities. The way the fifth way works, Aquinas thinks that nothing could point to a certain outcome as toward a final cause, like the acorn pointing toward the tree as its natural outcome, or the phosphorus in the match pointing toward flame and heat as its natural outcome, unless there were some intellect

aiming something toward its final cause, you might say. Because until the fire actually exists, or the tree actually exists, the acorn is going to grow into, right? The idea here is that if the acorn points toward the oak tree, or the phosphorus in the match points toward flame and heat, but there is no flame and heat yet, or there is no tree yet, well, how exactly can a cause, even a final cause, that doesn't yet exist, how can it have any effect on the world? And Aquinas argues that the way that these final causes exist is as ideas in an intellect. The way that the acorn points toward the oak is because you might say the idea of becoming an oak exists in the mind of God as he points acorns in that direction or he points phosphorus in the direction of generating flame and heat and so forth. Now, the argument is a lot more complicated than that, and I spell it out in my book on Aquinas and elsewhere.

a lot more complicated than that, and I spell it out in my book on Aquinas and elsewhere. Point to emphasize for our purposes here, though, is that whatever one ultimately thinks about it, it's got nothing to do with complexity, with biology, or with anything that comes up in the dispute between William Paley on the one hand and Darwin on the other. Yeah, I like how you've put that. You know, suppose one of our listeners was to get into a conversation with an atheist regarding Aquinas' fifth way. They could simply ask them, do you think that Aquinas is talking about complexity? And they'd say, well, yeah. Do you think he's talking about biology? You know, yeah. Okay, well, then you haven't yet understood the argument, like those two clear, you know, tail signs that they haven't got it. All right, well, what I'd like to do now,

if you don't mind, is take a look. Since we've seen that Dawkins' attempt to refute Aquinas' five ways have failed, well, what does Dawkins actually have to say as far as an argument for atheism? Well, he puts this forth in pages 157, 158 of his book. He calls it the central argument of my book. So here we go. I mean, if this argument fails, then it seems like the entire work of this book, it hinges on this one argument. If it fails, then maybe the book overall isn't much use. Okay, so he says, hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. We don't have an equivalent explanation for physics. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. And then he concludes this whole argument by saying, therefore, God almost certainly doesn't exist. And for many of us who read that, we're completely stunned. I mean, I was really impressed that Dawkins here was going to try and make an argument

for why God probably doesn't exist. And I was looking forward to something meaty, and it ends on this, and I think, is that really it? Like, that's the best you've got to offer. Yeah. Yeah, Dawkins does put a lot of stock in this argument. He even, as you might know, Matt, in the index of his book, you know, he's got an entry early in the index, argument, comma, author's central argument, right? And then he directs you to pages 157 and 158 and the passages you just read. So he thinks this is a really big deal. I guess he thinks this is just a knockdown argument. You know, when I was in college, I had an English teacher who told us that good writing always

involves sticking your neck out, right? Taking a risk. So you got to hand it to Dawkins. He stuck his neck out. Okay. So now let me chop it off because he's stuck his neck out, but unfortunately, you know, he's gambled and lost because once again, yet again, and we saw this earlier when he talks about Aquinas, yet again he shows he just doesn't know what he's talking about. He thinks that the debate between atheism and theism is fundamentally a matter about how to explain complexity, that the answer to the question has to do with what the best scientific theory is and so forth. And in this case, he adds this element that if God exists, he'd have to be the most complex thing

around. He'd have to be more complex than the universe itself, so that the question of how we explain the universe, well, a similar question just repeats now at a higher level when we get to the designer. Okay. The problem with this is that, I mean, I don't know how to put it any more gently. He just doesn't know what he's talking about, because he doesn't understand how God is conceived of in classical philosophical theology. And I don't just mean in Aquinas, and I don't just mean in some obscure commentator on Aquinas. I mean the tradition that goes back to Plato, to Aristotle, to Plotinus, to Aquinas, but also Maimonides, and Avicenna, and Averroes, and Duns Scotus, and up through Leibniz, and Descartes, and all the

great early modern thinkers, as well as the ancient medieval ones when they talk about the existence and nature of God, they don't at all mean that God is the most complex thing. In fact, they all are explicit that they mean the reverse of that, that God is absolutely simple in the sense of non-composite, not made up of parts. He's not like a big machine, but just made out of ghost parts rather than physical parts. That's a complete cartoon. It's a ridiculous caricature, and it just shows that these guys just don't know what they're talking about. These classical writers repeatedly throughout the course of the centuries from the ancient Greeks through the medievals down to the modern period, they hammer in this idea that precisely because God, whatever else we say about God, is the ultimate explanation why anything exists at all. He's got to be where the

buck stops. Precisely because of that, we cannot think of God as complex. We cannot think of God as made up of a number of intricate parts. We have to think of him as, in some sense, non-composite, not composed of parts of any kind, and thus absolutely simple. So that even when we attribute different things to God, we say that God is all-powerful, he's all-knowing, he's all-good, he's immaterial, he's outside time and space, etc., that we have to understand these as all different labels for what in God is really one and the same reality. Because if he's got distinct parts, he's, just as Dawkins says, he's going to have to require a cause of his own. Dawkins thinks this is a brilliant objection. Well, if God's so complex, then he'd need a cause of his

own. And he thinks that's an objection to Aquinas or to Aristotle or to Augustine, whatever. What he doesn't realize is they would all say, well, yeah, that's what we say. That's exactly what we say. God is not complex because you're right, Dawkins, he would need a cause of his own. So he must not be complex. He must be absolutely simple. Now, what exactly that means, this doctrine of divine simplicity or God not being composite, and by the way, it doesn't mean God is easy to understand. It's quite the opposite. The way the human mind tends to understand things is by breaking them down into their parts and then seeing how the parts are recombined. And we can't do that when we get to God, because there are, God's non-composite,

there are no parts in God. So, understanding God is very difficult, precisely because he's simple in the sense of not made up of parts. Now, this doctrine of divine simplicity, it's, you know, it takes some work to spell it out and to defend it and to explain exactly what it means, and I do that in a number of places, especially in my new book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, where I defend it at some length. But whatever one ultimately thinks about it, if you don't understand that that's what Aquinas and Augustine and Maimonides and Avicenna and Averroes and Plotinus and Aristotle and Leibniz and all these other guys, all the big names, if you don't understand that that's what they're on about, that's what they're talking about when

they talk about God, then you just don't understand, you don't understand that that's what they're on about, that's what they're talking about when they talk about God, then you just don't understand. You don't know anything about theology. You don't know what you're talking about, and you've got no business writing books like The God Delusion. It's quite asinine, but Dawkins stuck his head out, and unfortunately, he just gave the opportunity for the critic to chop it off because he once again exposes his ignorance. to chop it off because he once again exposes his ignorance. And the other thing I'm sure you'd say too, Dr. Fazer, is, you know, even if Dawkins were right, that we shouldn't attribute a designer based on the appearance of design, well, okay, but it doesn't follow from that that God almost certainly doesn't exist. I mean,

you and I might come to believe in God for all sorts of other arguments, like four out of the five ways that Aquinas gives, or the moral argument, or the ontological argument. Right, right. Yeah, there's a good... Yeah, you go. This is, I mean, you know, he's got this William Paley fixation, and as I think I put it in the last superstition, my book on the new atheists, that if Paley were alive today, he might look into getting a restraining order against Dawkins, because the guy, he's fixated on Paley,. He thinks that every

argument for God's existence is really just kind of a riff on William Paley. Now, I think part of that is because he's a biologist. He's a biologist. Exactly right. He thinks as a biologist, he's got a really knocked down objection to Paley. And so he tends to exaggerate Paley's significance. And to be fair to Dawkins, I mean, there certainly are apologists who make a big deal out of the design argument, but historically, writers who defend arguments for God's existence don't put a lot of stock in that particular argument, the William Paley-style argument. And another thing that Dawkins in this passage that you cite fails to see is that not only are most arguments for god's existence not concerned with complexity

um but they're they're not concerned with anything that science per se has anything to tell us about because they begin instead with what even science itself has to presuppose and they go from there so the fact that there's any material world at all rather than no material world, the fact that the world is governed by the fundamental laws of physics that it is governed by rather than alternative laws or rather than no laws at all, the fact that there are cause and effect patterns in the world or there's any change in the world at all. These are all things which, as I argue in the book, you can show that science itself presupposes. Because it presupposes them, it can't really tell us anything about them. But it's these basic presuppositions

of science that are the starting points of arguments like Aquinas' in the five ways and elsewhere. Well, Dr. Faisal, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to be on our show today. I know there's like thousands of Catholic geeks out there that are all super pumped that you've been on this podcast. So thank you very much. Where can people learn more about your terrific work? Obviously, we want everyone to go get five proofs of the existence of God. How else can they maybe follow you or what else might you suggest that they get to learn more about what you've had to say on these issues? They can take a look at my website. It's edwardfaser.com. Edward, you know how to spell

that. My last name Faser is F-E-S-E-R, edwardfaser.com. And that'll give a link to my blog, among other things, and tell them how to find my books and articles and so on and so forth. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you. All forth. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Bye. And yes, that was Edward Fazer's phone ringing at the end of the show. We joked about it.

I'm like, no, it's cool. It's just like outro music. It's fine. It's fine. Anyway, hey, guys, hope you enjoy those two awesome episodes with Edward Fazer. What an honor to have him on the show. I've told you this a couple of times now,

but one more time, this is the final week. If you want to enter the raffle to win this five-volume set of St. Thomas' Sympathia Logia, we're also raffling off two copies of Fazer's new book, go to pintswithaquinas.com. And at the top there, the top post, you can just click there, and then you can enter the raffle, and I'll let you know soon who won. So that'll be pretty cool. All right. Now, as promised, let's get to your questions. All right. All right. Here we go. If you want me to answer your question, you just have to become a supporter on Patreon and I'd be happy to take a look at it. The reason I started this up is I was getting so many questions from people on Facebook and Twitter, Instagram, everywhere, and I cannot possibly respond to

everybody. So if you want to support this show, which you should because it's awesome, you would go to pintswithaquinas.com, click support. You can give as little as $5 a month, and you'll see the different rewards that I give you for supporting the show. All right, let's take a look at some questions that have come in. We might take a look at two or three. Okay, this first question comes from Raymond Salazar. I think that's how I say your last name. Thank you very much for supporting Pints with Aquinas on Patreon, Raymond. You rock. You write, even though there's joy in doing God's work and spreading the good news, logical faith-based thought is largely under attack in

today's world. Have you ever lost any friends or relationships because of your work as an apologist and your staunch Catholic views? Thanks, Raymond. Yes, definitely. I certainly have. When I was 17 years old, I came to Christ, as they say. Well, Christ came to me. And at that point, I became like, as I've said in a previous episode, one of those very, very happy Christians, very, very, very enthusiastic. And I came back to a group of friends who didn't understand it. And because of that, I think we gradually separated. They began seeing what I had to say, you know, either because we were in the company of each other and I shared some opinions that weren't, that they weren't down with, or maybe they saw

some of the things that I posted on Facebook back in the day and they got offended by that. So I've certainly have lost some very close friends, like friends that I went to high school with, people that I would like to be friends with. Like, I actually think they're really good people. But, you know, I remember I reached out a couple of years ago just to say hi. And this person said, I tried to block you on purpose. Why is it that you're messaging me? Go away. Something like that. Like, this is a guy that I was like really close with. And that really stung, like that really hurt my heart. And so I think when instances like that happen, we can go to one of two extremes, right? Like, either one, we can just sort of, you know, pretend that we didn't mean what we said,

or we can like dilute the faith, or we can sort of say to that person, maybe we can just apologize, you know, when we shouldn't apologize, because we were just bearing witness to the truth, right, that we believe we received. Okay, so that's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum, I think, is to say, yep, you know, Jesus told me that I would be hated if I was his follower, so this is it. Now, the reason I say this might be the other end of the spectrum is because maybe at that point, we're completely unwilling to look at the fact that the way we're communicating the faith is abrasive and disrespectful. Does that make sense? And so, and I think I've done that. I think many Catholics have done that. We do, we can,

everyone, not just Catholics, right, can fall into the trap of being arrogant and being triumphalistic, you know. So I think we've got to be honest about that too, you know, like we might be able to come to a middle ground and say, all right, you know what? The way I shared the faith was pretty, uh, yeah, pretty abrasive. And, uh, and I got to learn from this situation. Like that doesn't mean watering down the truth, but it might mean changing the way in which we evangelize because all of us have had people in our lives who have tried to convert us, or at least I think that's fair to say, right? Like most people have, even if it's just like a missionary at the door. And you know that feeling when someone really, you know, they don't really care about you,

you know, a great deal, but yet they're trying to make you believe in something that's completely different and contrary to what you now believe. And that's a huge, difficult thing to do. And it takes time. And I know I've had the experience where people have like, argue with me as if I was going to change my thought on this thing that I believe to be fundamental right there on the spot, right? And it's not fun, right? When that happens, like you kind of feel used, you know, you kind of feel like, am I just like a notch in your belt here? You know what I mean? So if we can sympathize with that, if we can recognize what that's like to have people approach us and treat us almost like a number, then I think we really need to be careful

when we talk to other people about the faith. And that doesn't mean, okay, Matt, so what you're saying is the tactic we should use is to care about people in order to convert them. No, right? Like, no. We should just care about people and journey with them, we should take a holistic approach or a holistic appreciation of them, like, not just to talk about the things that they believe when it comes like metaphysics, but like, to actually genuinely walk beside them and like, be interested in what they're interested in, you know, like share with their hopes, share in their joys and those sorts of things. I think it was, we've had Randall Rouser on the show before. He's a friend of mine. We disagree about many things, but I would consider him a brother in Christ. And Randall has this analogy where he says, you know, think of those deep fundamental beliefs that we hold.

So like you, Raymond, for example, I would take it that you would be against abortion, right? That you would think abortion is something abhorrent, okay? Now, suppose somebody comes up to you and they try to convince you why abortion is okay. Can you imagine, like, let's just say, like you, how much would it take for you to go, yeah, okay, I've changed my mind now. Like, it would take a lot, right? And the same is true on the other way around. Like, if you're trying to convert somebody who thinks that abortion is like women's health care, it's about women's health care and it's

liberating to women and for them to swap sides, it's not just a matter of changing one belief, it's almost like a whole lot of other things have to change as well. So the analogy Randall uses is, you know, suppose your wife says, go get me the vacuum cleaner from the attic. You go upstairs and suppose you open the attic door and you realize, oh my goodness, this is stuff right in the back. Like, what would you do? Well, you might say, do I have to get it? Or can I go buy another one? You know, why? Because there's a whole lot of other stuff that has to be moved around. All right. So this is a good analogy, I think, for those beliefs that are really kind of integral to who we are, or at least that we

perceive to be integral to who we are, you know. Yeah, but then there's other trivial beliefs. Like if you said to me, Matt, is Sydney the capital of Australia? Because let's say you suppose that, and I said, no, it's Canberra, you wouldn't fight me on it, you know, you'd be like, oh, okay, it's Canberra. So in that respect, you know, the analogy would be different, it'd be like the vacuum cleaner at the door. So it's like, well, that's really easy. I can change that. So anyway, that's a long-winded answer to your question. But yes, I've lost friends, and Christ said that we would. And so I think we shouldn't be afraid to do that. And at the same time, we should reflect upon the way in which we're communicating the gospel and see if the way we're doing it might be a little arrogant or abrasive and so forth.

Okay. All right. Let's take another question here. Brian Batko, thanks for your question. And thank you for your support. You said, is Moses considered a saint? He was a holy man and key player in salvation history, but I don't usually hear him referred to in this way. Is it because he was Jewish and not a Christian? Thanks. Thank you, Brian. So no, at least in the Western Christian tradition, we don't refer to those in the Old Testament, persons in the Old Testament, prophets and whatnot, as being saints. But that's not because we don't believe that they're in heaven. And that's really what we mean when we talk about a saint, right? I mean, in the New Testament, the word saint is

being used to talk about, you know, the church of God and those who were in Christ and so forth. Whereas in the Catholic church, when we refer to somebody as a saint, while we can technically use the word saint to say a living Christian, we tend to reserve it for those who were Christians who are now in heaven, okay? So this word was applied, as I said, to Christians who are holy, and it didn't ever really seem to evolve into being used for pre-Christian persons, okay? But that said, clearly there are Old Testament figures who are saints in heaven. Now you mentioned Moses, so we know from Matthew 17, right, on the transfiguration, you've got Moses and Elijah seen conversing with Christ. So clearly Moses is a saint, because by saint,

we mean one who is in heaven. And that's why we refer to St. Michael the Archangel, St. Gabriel, and these sorts of things. It just comes from the Latin word sanctus, right, meaning holy. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 61, it says, The patriarchs, prophets, and certain other Old Testament figures have been and always will be honored as saints in all the church's liturgical traditions. Okay, so there you are. So even though we don't refer to them as a Saint Moses, Saint Elijah, and so forth, they are recognized as saints. So, and in fact, maybe you've seen, in fact, we even kind of sometimes refer to like to Adam, like I think the church generally recognizes that Adam is in heaven. Okay. And so in a sense, you could refer

to him as Saint Adam. Sometimes you'll see a cross and beneath the cross, you might see a skull at the foot of the cross. Do you know what that represents? It doesn't just represent Christ conquering death. It represents the skull of Adam, right? And that the blood from the tree of the cross coming down and sort of raising Adam from the dead. So there you go. Hope that's a help. Okay, well, I think that'll do it for this week. Thank you very much for listening to Pints with Aquinas.

Looking forward to chatting with you next week and also looking forward to letting y'all know who won this third volume set of the Summa Theologiae and these two books from Edward Fazer. Again, go to pintswithaquinas.com, click on the top blog post, and that's how you can enter the raffle. God bless.

Chat with you next week. My whole life to carry you, to carry you. And I would give my whole life to carry you, to carry you, to carry you, to carry you, to carry you, to carry you.