April 11, 2026 - Michael Philpott, Philosophy & Theory

What is truth—and why does it matter in our daily lives? This reflection explores the story of human thought, from early questions about existence to the development of philosophy, science, and faith. Discover how the pursuit of truth has shaped civilization, how it connects to Christian belief, and why reclaiming a love of wisdom is essential for navigating today’s world.

MC: Joseph Gruber

Presenter: Michael Philpott

Deacon: Rick Freedberg

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All right, so this was a tough one to put together because it is a big topic. So what I'd like to do today as we talk about philosophy is really to understand why it's important for us, as Joseph just alluded to. It's not just something for eggheads in the ivory tower of academia.

But rather than do it by going through it and giving definitions and lists of philosophical schools and all of that, I thought it might be more useful to kind of tell a story. And that story being the story of man and the development of his thought. It's very cut down, so for anybody who has deeper knowledge in these areas, please forgive me for some oversimplifications.

So a long time ago, the life of man was very simple. They were hunter-gatherers, living in groups, following herds, eating the fruit of the land, paying attention to the seasons, observing the stars at night around their campfire, and primarily using their minds to understand the world they lived in for survival. So mankind has been around for a very, very long time.

And we've had the same size brains the entire time. But it wasn't until about, you know, between 6,000 to 10,000 years ago where we started to figure out agriculture and those types of things. So, but he kept going forward and then still asking those questions.

I cannot believe that we who have the same size brain, the same physiology as our distant ancestors, that they didn't ask those same basic questions that we all ask. Why? Why are things the way they are? Where did they come from? What is their purpose? And this question then led them to develop, to agriculture and invent tools and create civilizations that maximize their ability to survive. And then this question also was the source of their stories and of their myths, their religions, and then laws and moral codes.

And they sought to understand where we came from and why we are here. What's the best way to live a fulfilled life? What's the very nature of life and death? Why do we die? It was at the end. And yet, for thousands of years, there was only so far they could take these questions.

Life was really hard and they had a lot of things to do just to survive. And they could really only pass on knowledge orally, from father to son to his son. And these very often then took the form of story and of narrative.

But then about 2,500 years ago, and this is one of those oversimplifications, about 2,500 years ago, there was a man in a city that afforded him enough leisure to spend most of his time thinking about these questions. And he gathered around him a bunch of young men, students, and they'd ask one another these questions back and forth and weren't satisfied with the myths that the pagan religion of theirs told them explained the world. The stories of gods that really weren't that much different than men and did very confusing actions, certainly to our mind, just wasn't enough.

And so they worked through these questions with logic that did not rely on myth. And around this time, a new technology had developed to the point where they could go further than simple oral narrations because they could now write them down and pass them to the next generation. And so you didn't need to reinvent the wheel and rediscover.

The knowledge was there. The next generation could take that, learn it, and build on it. And so philosophy was born.

Philosophy means the love of wisdom. And they were interested in everything about the world, math, physics, chemistry, morality and ethics, the best ways to organize a society, the very nature of man, of life, the soul, creation. All of this was philosophy, all of it.

They would observe a thing, an object or phenomenon, an aspect of the human existence, take note of its characteristics. What was observable, real, what could we agree on? Starting facts that were unprovable because they simply were. Undoubtedly true.

This is something that's called first principles. And then so they would take these first principles and then interrogate them. How did they fit together? Trying to figure out what was the reality and the truth behind that observable reality.

And they asked all sorts of questions to include, well, what are clouds? We know now in our science, we take for granted it's a bunch of water molecules flying around and they're together enough that they become visible to the eye and when they get too heavy they cause rain. This wasn't knowable to people who were constrained to the ground and didn't have instruments that could float up and take measurements. And so what are they, how do they, they seem to be at the same height, so maybe they're kind of fixed to the earth somehow, but then they move.

And so these are very tough questions and these are the types of things they asked about. But all of this was done through the human mind and through the intellect and again, divorced of that pagan mythology. And so this man was killed by his city for his faithlessness and the gods.

But it didn't stop his students from continuing to ask questions. So they wrote down these thoughts and generations, they built on them over time. One of his students would observe the world and say, okay, that's a table, what is it that makes that a table? It's got four legs, it's flat on the top, it's made of wood or some kind of hard material.

So that makes it distinct from a chair, but it makes it like a table. But each table is a little bit different. Maybe there's an ideal form of a table somewhere, a perfect table.

And so this idea that there was a transcendent truth, that the substance of a thing, the very being of a thing, was a reflection of, became foundational for him. And then he had a student who was a very logical guy. And he broke down all of those topics in an extremely logical order.

Wrote books on ethics, dove into those science questions. Politics. These guys' names were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Does anybody know who Aristotle's student was? Alexander the Great. He wasn't a philosopher, right? Why might he be important, though, to this story? No, but Alexander the Great. Okay, he conquered the known world.

Now, he died very quickly, but the kingdoms that came about after him from his generals who founded those kingdoms brought this way of thinking to the rest of the world. It influenced the world. It was called the Hellenistic world.

So it spread this. Now, while all of this was happening, and for a long time before, there was another group of people, and they were writing down their own stories. They weren't fantastical stories of gods fighting as men do on top of mountains and in the sea.

It was their story, an underdog story, a story of survival that was tightly bound to their faith in a god that was not a polygamous drunkard, or one that had the head of an animal, but was the creator of all things. And, of course, this is the people of Israel. They were part of that land that Alexander conquered, so these ideas started to be able to mix, these ways of thinking.

And then that creator became a man and revealed the truth of the good news. And it was in a world where people would have these tools of philosophy. And so then these new believers, these Christians, they had these tools to be able to take the teachings from these three short years of Jesus' ministry to take the strange and mysterious events of his death and resurrection and apply rational thought suffused with faith to understand them.

That concept that Plato had of an ideal form of the thing now could be married to the Jewish belief that man was made in God's image and likeness. And it helped us grasp that the Son of God in the flesh was that ideal. Helped us understand the implication of Christ's incarnation and resurrection on us.

Because if he's that perfect ideal, then that is something that we can strive to and that God lifts us up to. And so I don't think it was any mistake that the most successful missionary of the early church was St. Paul, who is an intellect himself, a man who can make the faith understandable to the Greeks. And so this has all been a story of man seeking truth.

It's a story of when the Son of God revealed himself to be the way, the truth, and life. And he gave mankind the key to the truth, which was himself. But there were still a lot of doors yet to be unlocked with that key.

So after several centuries of applying faith and reason to the theological questions, and I'm not going to go too far into theology because that's a talk coming up, I think, next week. But they applied this to the good news and the fathers of the church and the early Christians settled the main tenets of the Revelation and expressed them in the Nicene Creed. There's one God and three persons.

The Son was incarnated with both the human and divine nature. He died for our sins, rose from the dead, and established the church with an epistolic authority that would unite the faithful until the last day and the resurrection of the dead. So why is then theology important to the discussion of philosophy? Just because it tells us that the world is not a mistake, that it's the expression of a divine intention, that creation is good.

The physical world, though broken in sin, is destined to be restored in holiness. So the world being good, man can apply his reason to the world and with grace discover God. And so for a long time, though, the intellectual power that came from that philosophy was focused on these theological questions.

This was now the aim of civilization, was to delve into this. And the Western Roman Empire kind of degraded. I don't like the term the Dark Ages.

So those writings were lost from Aristotle and Plato and Euclid and all the rest. But they persevered in the lands that would become Muslim lands. And so when the Reconquista happened and the Christians retook Spain from the Muslims, essentially they rediscovered these texts of the old philosophers who had been translated into Arabic.

And so now they're translated now into Latin and became a gift to the West. And so St. Thomas Aquinas, as was mentioned, was able to apply Aristotle to theological questions and then many, many, many thinkers gave birth to modern science. So the next part of the story is that as our understanding of the natural world now was growing by leaps and bounds over these new generations, the pursuit of truth began to fragment into specialized disciplines.

So while a Greek philosopher might write treatises on every question from the physics of clouds to the organization of society, the amount of knowledge required to go deeper into each topic required an ever-increasing intense focus and specialization. Philosophy separated from theology. Natural philosophers became biologists, astronomers, physics, chemists.

Man, we began to struggle with seeing the world as a unified creation of spiritual material. His exposures to the complexities that his ancestors could never have imagined started to cause doubts to arise. People began to ask a question that one infamous Roman had asked Christ long ago, not what is the truth, but what is truth? They started to doubt the existence of truth.

So the concept that there is a truth to strive after was a basic principle that drove the entire philosophical project for centuries. But then when the idea that perception, how I see a thing, became more foundational than the substance of the thing as the root of reality, things started to break. And so for the past few hundred years we've experienced doubts on every level.

Our mooring from the idea that there is a truth of existence has been lost. It's gotten so bad that relativism doesn't just affect our concepts, that the existence of many differences of opinion might bring doubt as to whether the truth is knowable. But even that the truth doesn't exist and that simple and observational things aren't even correct, the idea of first principles starts to disappear.

We went from different worldviews have equal values to now, is gender just a social construct? I can't even recognize the physical reality in front of my face. And another problem arises. It's related.

The specializations of science gave rise to an explosion in amazing technologies that empowered humans in a way our ancestors could never imagine. Life became better, easier. We really became lords of the world.

Gods, even. But this came at the cost of separating science from metaphysics, which is another way of thinking about the spiritual world. The material world took the forefront of our attention at the same time that it explained creation in ways that didn't require attributing nature's movements to the spiritual realm.

We separated science from the spiritual and believed the material world, or at least some of us, that that's all there was. If we didn't need God to explain the workings of the world, we thought, in the spiritual world, this must not exist. I mean, I think that's a logical fallacy, but that's the fact of what happened.

So what happens when man's destiny is only material? How do you wrestle with the problem of evil? Truth, understanding the essence of creation, its purposes, its ideals, loses all transcendence and the material becomes everything. This is something that both Marxists and ideological capitalists have something in common. The measurement of success of society is material happiness.

We look at things through this despotic sociological view. The end result matters, not whether you live according to the purpose that you have. Again, something that the ancient Greeks knew existed.

Let me get this right. Tilios, is that right? The tilios of a thing, the purpose of a thing, that there is an innate and inherent purpose to each and every part of creation. So what happens then? Well, now all of a sudden, power and the force of will ascend to dominance.

So it seems pretty dark as to where this story has ended up to this point. And that's why this story is important. Because philosophy, love of wisdom, is important to all of us.

It should be important to all of us. Some people think that the world of theory is unimportant. It doesn't have a practical application in my life.

Again, that disconnected professors, they're wasting their time with these lofty theories. But they are important, because they trickle down into our lives. Yes, it was pointy-headed people who came up with relativistic philosophies, Kant and Marx and all of those guys.

But those thoughts have trickled down and they are with us in our daily lives and they are with our children. So I'm not saying... Joseph might disagree with me. I'm not saying you need to run out and read Aristotle.

But most of us are fathers or grandfathers or at least uncles. And so don't you think if we'd had a better exposure to this when we were young, to how to ask questions and how to think through them, that there are certain observable truths as first principles that we can work from to develop a methodology of thinking about the world, that maybe we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in. And so I guess the end point here is support liberal arts education.

Right, because our children are our future, right? And obviously here we've got the Chesterton School in town which takes this to heart. But the Diocese of Lansing is in a long march to also change its education methodology to get back to Catholic liberal arts education. This coming year they're going to be introducing the new history curriculum.

Now social studies, it's now going to be history and the emphasis on his story. So it'll be a Christ-centered view of history. So change is happening, gentlemen.

So again, as fathers, grandfathers, uncles, just members of the community, supporters of our schools, let's make sure that we put this front and center so that our kids have the tools to go into this very messy, crazy world that lost its purpose, that lost its sense of truth, so they can rediscover truth and rebuild our society. We may not live to see it, but it's going to happen. So I don't have a particular special prayer to end with, but I did before this look up, as you guys do your own personal studies, whether you do pick up Aristotle or whether you're picking up the Bible, St. Thomas Aquinas has a really, really good prayer.

Before study it's very short, but it kind of encapsulates all of this, asking for the Holy Spirit to come into your hearts and to be able to bring light to the darkness of the world. So thank you. applause Thank you, Michael.

So for prayer, we're going to pray the fifth joyful mystery, the finding of the child Jesus in the temple. Jesus spent three days in the temple with the priests and the scribes, asking questions, being asked questions. God is not afraid of our questions.

He actually delights in conversing with us. So let's meditate on a God who humbled himself to take on the form of a man, that he could be approachable and questioned, and he could ask us questions as well. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

The fifth joyful mystery is the finding of the child Jesus in the temple after his three days there answering and asking questions. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever. O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell.

Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Alright, if you want to fill up on coffee, get another donut, and then move to the round tables for discussion, we'll be there in just a minute. Thank you.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)