Robert J. Spitzer

Robert J. Spitzer (b. 1952) is an American Jesuit priest and philosopher who served as president of Gonzaga University (1998–2009) and founded the Magis Center, an institute devoted to articulating the rationality of Catholic belief through engagement with contemporary science. Trained in philosophy at the Catholic University of America (Ph.D., 1989), Spitzer integrates Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics with arguments drawn from Big Bang cosmology, fine-tuning data, and near-death experience research. His best-known work, New Proofs for the Existence of God (2010), revives cosmological and design arguments using results from contemporary physics, particularly the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, and Bernard Lonergan's metaphysics of unconditioned reality. Spitzer also writes extensively on suffering, happiness, and the soul in a multivolume Quartet on happiness and the human person. He frequently appears on EWTN and engages public debates with new atheists. Critics, including some analytic philosophers of religion, have questioned whether the physical results Spitzer marshals carry the metaphysical weight he assigns them, and naturalists dispute his readings of cosmological singularity theorems. Within Catholic philosophy, his work is positioned alongside William Lane Craig's kalam apologetics and the broader revival of natural theology, though Spitzer's distinctive contribution is the synthesis of Lonergan's transcendental Thomism with empirical cosmology. His writings remain primarily apologetic in genre rather than technical philosophy.