Philosophy For Catholic Parishioners - Ep. 119

Father Steve Williams here, Saints in the Parish podcast.

This will have Donald Paul Maddox, our co-host, here with us, and happy, of course, very, very happy to be with you here and certainly encourage you to like and subscribe and share this with other people.

This morning we're talking about philosophy.

I wanted to talk about philosophy because I feel strongly that we have to educate the faithful you and educate you a little bit more.

And so as a result of that, Don Paul has been teaching a class in our parish for four weeks on philosophy.

And I was like really interested to see what kind of questions the parishioners had.

I was interested to see what concepts they really are interested in or what concepts maybe they're struggling to understand.

I was just very interested just to hear how the people are doing in your class.

Of course, there were two things I wanted to talk about, and we can talk about these a little later, but I want to talk a little bit about natural law and how important that is.

And I want to talk a little bit about the ends and the means and how those two philosophical realities play a part in our lives probably every day.

But uh so tell me how the classes are going.

Yeah, they're great.

Um as we're recording this, I've we're halfway done, so I've done two.

Um, this is actually somewhat of a repeat.

I did this class originally about two years ago.

So it's not the exact same class, but I've kind of molded it and shaped it.

And um there's a lot of some of the same people that came the last time, but there's also a lot of new people.

Um so that's really cool to see.

Um it's interesting because you might think like I'm crazy for doing a philosophy class.

Uh you don't, but uh of all of the classes that I teach, and I've taught, I don't know, like 20 classes in three years, this is the most well-attended of any class I've ever taught.

And this is a four-week, once-a-week, very intensive intellectual class.

Yeah.

And even the like the first time, it was even more well attended.

Like it, it is incredible how interested Catholic prisoners are.

The subject is more interesting than most people.

It sounds a little boring, but the subject is much more interested.

I'll tell you why I like it so much, is because the church, down throughout the centuries, has been kind of the primary educator in the ways of the faith.

And in order to understand anything about the faith, you have to have some way, some philosophical education.

You have to know how to think.

You know, that's that's very important.

And that's what philosophy is all about.

Philosophy is all about like having an appreciation for thinking, learning how to think, you know, studying how other people think so that you can compare and contrast that.

You know, so philosophy is really important to us if we want to learn.

And as a matter of fact, you know, I've taught for years and years and years in high school, and I love teaching, and uh the high school students were, you know, were always very interesting.

I used to write the word think on the board because when we're discussing a particular topic, what did I want them to do?

I wanted them to think about this topic.

Whatever the topic was, I want them to think about the topic.

And and and I believe that the truth is there.

We have to seek and search and find it, and we have to think about it in order for us to really understand what the truth is.

The truth is so vitally important.

And sometimes today, other people want to make the truth relative, they want to make the truth kind of gray, they want to make the truth uh, you know, not really the most important thing.

And I'm like, wow, that is crazy.

So they're taking away from you your ability to learn, is what they're taking away from you.

And I think what did Jesus do?

Jesus got really mad and upset a few times, and he got mad and upset with the Pharisees and maybe the Sadducees, mostly the Pharisees, because he felt like they had taken away the key to the key to God.

They had taken that away from the people and said, we have the key, so y'all, you don't get to, unless we, unless, you know, unless we adhere to it and we agree to it, you can't learn anything about God.

He's like, No.

No, no, no.

That's so, so, and he even says that in sacred scripture.

So I think that's really important for us today to say to ourselves, we want to learn as much as we possibly can learn.

Okay, and also, you have children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, you know, parents that you can share this with.

Y'all, how many conversations do y'all get in all the time?

You get in these conversations.

So, and you don't want them to be arguments, don't want it to be arguments, but you want it to be um what I call methodical, slow, you know, that you can slowly but surely help them to understand a lot of the teachings of the church.

Because some of the teachings of the church are kind of deep, and you need to have this philosophical mind in order to really understand them.

You know, so uh, and I think even more so today, you start talking about anything to do with socialism, communism, Marxism, you start talking about any of those realities, they are philosophical realities.

They're philosophical realities.

So you have to understand um how to help um think about those realities.

So think about what Jesus said, think about what St.

Augustine said, St.

Thomas Aquinas said, think about what even Aristotle and Plato and Aristotle, who are great philosophers, they call Father of Philosophy, Socrates.

Although Socrates didn't write a whole lot down, so that's why we rely so much on Plato and Aristotle, who wrote a lot down, and then Thomas Aquinas, who took Plato and Aristotle and almost, in a sense, kind of Christianized it.

And that's a simplification again, but he did.

He took a lot of the theology and their ethics, and he helped um us, you know, reply it to our Christian life.

So I guess that kind of leads me into uh what were let's let's see, let's do this first.

Let's do this.

What are some topics that you think we should discuss here that are really important topics?

Like, so we named natural law, we named the means, the means and ends, like what exactly is the means and what are the ends?

What are some other topics that you you think that we should kind of touch on that are really important for people to know?

Yeah, one that I that I think it's actually the class I taught today, um, it's on metaphysics.

Okay.

Which I know is one of your favorites.

So so even what is metaphysics?

So we can talk about metaphysics and for you to know what metaphysics is, puts you light years ahead of many other people.

Because they would look at you like you have four eyes and say, what are you talking about?

But what but if you're gonna talk about God, then you have to understand it in a metaphysical way.

Okay.

Metaphysical.

Yeah, and I found today specifically, I found when people what I try to do is I try to trace, you know, I give the basic concepts, kind of teach, kind of just that the kind of basic, kind of what I think people need to know.

And then I find really helpful is tracing a lot of them of our modern cultural thought back to kind of what where they're coming from.

Okay, okay.

So explain that to me.

So cultural thought, so like what culture are we are we are we tracing that back to?

So so a lot of our So the French Revolution or something like that?

Well, some of that, like with freedom and I mean talking about ins to a means, I mean, that's a whole freedom, and you can kill anybody you want to get to that.

Um but what you're doing is right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, right.

Okay, that's a great thing for us to do that.

So that's a great one.

But but you're cultural.

Yeah.

So for example, like in today's society, like when we talk about the transgender phenomenon.

Okay.

So, you know, let's let's take aside the like the political, let's just talk about the the human side.

The person, the person.

If you do not understand the basic, we would say metaphysical, the reality of what it means to be not only just a human being, but just alive in the world, if you don't understand how to account for what makes you human, what makes you a distinct human from another person, what makes you just different from a rock or a tree or what makes you unique.

Inanimate object.

Yes, then you don't understand what human dignity is because you don't understand what connects us together.

So, like I said today, which everybody kind of gets not riled up, but they get they're like, oh my gosh, like, okay, I understand.

Like, if you don't understand that we're all human beings, that we all share something which what we would call human dignity that we know from Genesis from God, but we all share that no matter what we look like, what we sound like, our education, where we come from, this color of our skin, then slavery makes sense because now what makes that person of more worth than that person?

Well, if you don't share something in common, then your skill set can make you less than a person, your skin color can make you less than a person.

Your ability to think.

Yeah, your ability to think.

But if a human being, regardless of skin color, is a human being and human beings are worth dignity, then slavery slavery is wrong.

Right.

Then, you know, uh bullying is wrong.

You know, all of these kind of societal woes we see are wrong, and you have an ability to understand why they're wrong because we all share something in common.

We are human, even though we look different, we sound different, we come from different cultures, maybe we value different things, and maybe some things are maybe I'm more correct than you are, but it doesn't matter that we're both human, so we are both worthy of dignity.

Yeah, exactly.

And that comes from metaphysics.

And also the fact that Jesus Christ was a human being added another whole element to the dignity of the human person.

Correct.

That because we are followers of Christ.

Yeah, another another thing that I think is is really, really important um is the fact that so talking about the like the pro-life issue.

So that issue, yes, you can have the political discussion, which is all anybody talks about, which I'm not saying it's not important.

That's a very important topic.

I think the more important topic that we need to talk about is the metaphysical problem, the metaphysical problem of if you cannot explain why a one-day-year-old human being is a human being and a three-day pre-born, so three days before the child's born, what makes that a child and what makes that not a child?

And you don't hear that very much in the world.

And you don't hear that.

And I think that's the reason why is because they can't.

Right, because that's a metaphysical philosophical problem.

Yeah.

What accounts for just the location change, what accounts for human change, and if you can't account for that, then yeah, abortion makes sense.

And the crazy thing about that is that, you know, two one or two days before you're born, you know, if something happens to that baby, there it doesn't matter.

You know, they may not even, if they're in an automobile accident and say a mother and a baby dies, they may not even count that as but one life.

Or if uh you know, or if, you know, one or two days before the baby is born, they want to have an abortion, which is legal in several states, right up till the second third trimester.

Um, no criminal reality.

But now let the baby be born, and you do something to that baby one or two days after it's born, which we've seen this happen in our society, haven't we?

You know, uh a mother decides they don't want them, so they suffocate them.

All of a sudden she's gonna spend the rest of her life in jail.

I mean, this is a matter of a day or two, and we don't have a problem trying to understand that.

You know, I mean, you know, we have to come, we have to be uh, we have to use common sense in this.

And so it really does help us to understand this.

And of course, we get we get all of the arguments, all the pro-life arguments, but um, I the my favorite was two, I don't know whether you were here two or three years ago, we had the the doctor who operated on the uh on the child in utero.

Yep.

And uh, I mean, so he had another doctor taking care of the mother, but he was operating on the little baby in the womb.

And uh, you know, and then he closes it up and then he says, well, the best place for this baby to be after heart surgery, by the way, is to be in the mother's womb for the next, you know, eight to ten weeks and kind of go full term, you know, to be born.

And he showed us a picture of the baby when the baby turned five or six, you know, amazing.

Just amazing.

Okay, well, let's uh let's let's just delve right on in.

Um, which topic do you want to tackle first here?

We'll do uh let's do natural law first.

But I like I like natural law a lot.

Um and people get that confused a lot with laws of nature, which is um which laws of nature basically is you know um it's nature as we find it.

In other words, like, you know, so you can write the laws of nature because you see it and you write it down.

So this is gonna happen if if you know, if you combine oxygen and hydrogen at a certain proportion, you're gonna have water.

You know, that's a physical reality.

Or if you could if you combine them, you know, that's H2O, right?

But if you combine them H2O2, you have peroxide, hydrogen peroxide.

So you so you know that so you have to know how you combine them, right?

So those are physical realities.

So that's the laws of nature.

This is gonna happen, and this is gonna happen.

And the sun is gonna come up every day, you know, and the earth is rotating around the sun.

And these are these are all, you can write all these down, these are the laws of nature.

And so some people want to get the laws of nature messed mixed up with the natural law.

Now, the way natural the way I describe natural law, and we'll see if see if it's the same way you describe it.

This is uh I almost like to change it sometimes and call it divine law.

Uh I like to do that, just call it divine law because it's about God.

So it's the way it's the natural law, it's the way things ought to be.

Just a simple definition.

You know, I like simple definitions.

What do you think about that definition?

The way things ought to be.

Yeah, and I it's also the way that the way that God created the world to the way that God created the world.

So it's divine law.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's also the natural law is also important because it doesn't necessarily rely on revelation.

It doesn't rely on God revealing himself through scripture.

And also doesn't rely on natural, it doesn't rely on the laws of nature either.

Right.

Just because you can find this in in in nature doesn't mean that that upsets natural law.

You know, it's the way things ought to be, not always the way they are.

And and that's is the way God set them in motion, is the way God, you know, so that plays so it plays a very important role in God being a part of this.

And like a great example of the natural law would be like it's wrong to kill an innocent human being.

Yeah.

That is that is a that is part of the natural law.

Now, why that's wrong, and then now we can talk about you know the dignity of a human person and create in the image of God.

Like now we're getting outside of what's purely natural law, and now you're getting into revelation of a deeper understanding of the way that uh the things ought to be.

Well, they should you shouldn't kill a human being because they're created in the image likeness of God.

Well, we only know that because God revealed himself in that way.

Yeah.

Let's think of another example of natural law other than killing innocent human beings.

You can think of another good example come to mind.

Uh you know, don't don't you love it when I just put him on the spot here?

Well, a good ex a great example of the natural law is a lot of our actual like institutional laws are based on natural law.

So, like if you look at um like the right to like private property, the right to anything in the Constitution, those are typically now you can make an argument that they're based on like Christian understanding, which that came from natural law, which came from the natural law, but a lot of that is based purely on the natural law, like it's wrong to steal.

Well, well, why is it wrong to steal?

Because each of us have have a right to our even our own things, even there's a right to defend yourself, right?

You know, you think about that one.

I mean, that's the how someone's trying to hurt us or hurt your hurt your wife, hurt your children, then you have the right to stop them.

Even if you have to use deadly force, if that's all if that's all, if that's what it takes to stop them from hurting your wife, hurting your children, you you have the ability to do that.

Yeah, that would be because it's a violation of natural law for them to be hurting them.

Right.

And so you have a right under natural law to defend that.

Okay, well, uh, you know the ends justify the means.

Yeah, ask us this is the main problem.

Ask us some questions.

Okay, ask us if you want to.

You can uh nowadays it seems like people are asking more questions than ever before in the on on our on our reels or on our stories.

So yeah, but now we've got the ends and ends and the means.

And so I love this too.

I love this too.

I use it all the time, you know.

I always say the ends don't justify the means.

So basically, whatever our end is, we can't just go about getting it however we want.

So I need something to eat.

So I'm gonna go to the store and I'm just gonna pick up an apple, you know, and a banana, and I'm gonna walk right out of the store and not pay for it.

Because I need something to eat.

So the end doesn't justify the means.

Okay, and that's really important.

Go ahead.

Pick any end you want.

Pick any, you can call it, I also call the end maybe a good.

Um, you know, money.

Well, you don't have the right to rob a bank.

You need money.

Okay, well, you have to figure out a good means.

Work for the money, borrow the money.

You have to figure out a way a good what a good means in order for you to achieve that goal that you have of having some money.

Um and and this is really, really important, you know, that you understand that the means uh is how you get to that end.

And uh and uh often think about um I've often thought about writing a book and my the great title of a book, and then there is a book out there with this title, but it's not not talking about what I want to talk about, but I I want to write to what end?

To what end?

I mean what what what is our end in life?

What is our whole purpose in life?

What why are we doing what we're doing?

And I ask people that all the time, and they look at me like, what?

Why?

What's what no, you're not just working so that you can have some money so that you can feed your family.

I mean, that's a great thing, but then why do you want to feed your family?

Why do you want to, you know, I mean, you really have to ask yourself, why are you doing what you're doing?

That's very important.

Ultimately, ultimately, I hope it's because you want to live for all eternity in the in the presence of God and eternal salvation.

That would be our ultimate end.

And uh and I think all the other ends kind of lead toward that end, uh, you know, if that makes a little bit of sense to you.

So then you say, well, if that's our ultimate end, which remind which also think about this one for a second.

You can't have a good end and have uh evil means.

So if you if you say there's good, everything is good or evil.

Let's just say everything is good or bad.

There's everything, you know, there's no nothing in the middle.

Well, you can't have a good end and have an evil means or a bad end.

You know, a bad means.

You see what I'm saying?

So you can't say, you know, you want to, you know, um you want to uh feed your family, so you can't steal to do that.

Okay, that would be a that would be a bad means, uh even though it's a good end.

Okay?

Yeah, and I I think that's a great it's a it's a really great moral, ethical principle that we've known for centuries now.

And um, but I think in our society today we need to rediscover that.

Um because it goes into a lot of ethical questions that we won't we don't even need to discuss here, but you can think of a myriad of um of ethical questions that you know even if your the goal that you're trying to accomplish is good and it's morally good and it's ethically good and uh maybe salvifically good, you cannot do you cannot commit evil to bring about good.

Yeah, you can't do something that's wrong in order to do something that's good.

And this is because that that that makes the end then not good.

I was gonna say that this confuses people, but that would actually violate your end.

See what I'm saying?

So if that's your goal, then that's your end, and then you choose something evil to do it, then you just violated the very thing that you're trying to achieve, the goal that you're trying to get to.

So that's why you have to have really good, holy I like to use the word holy means, you know, in order to achieve those those goods, you know.

Yeah, very important.

Yeah.

So that's something I think to take away um from this is to analyze and make very specific um, as you talked about, think.

Think about before you could before you do any action or before you set a goal that you want to try to achieve, um, to make sure that the way that you're achieving that goal is good.

Now we talked about like ethical and like, you know, you think of like scientific and health and all kinds of kind of the obvious, but even something very simple as, you know, I want to to get a promotion in my job, great.

That's a that's a great thing.

Now, how are you gonna do it?

Are you gonna step on other people?

Are you gonna, you know, uh lie your way to the top?

Like, okay, well, now you've you've you've made you've made your end a bad because you've you've gone about doing it the wrong way.

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God bless.

God bless.