The First Truth

w/ Pastor Del

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome And The Problem Of Truth

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Truth About Podcast with Apostle Dell Phillips.

SPEAKER_05 0:11

Is truth absolute? If truth is absolute, this means if something is true, then the moment it becomes true, it's true for all times. Studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

If at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to.

SPEAKER_05 0:29

Somebody that says there's no such thing as absolute truth is making a statement they believe is absolutely true.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Welcome to the Truth About Podcast. Conversations about big issues and ideas that seem familiar, seeking to uncover underlying themes that don't depend on trends, headlines, or personal

What “First Truth” Really Means

SPEAKER_00 1:00

opinions. In this episode, we will dive into the deepest level of our truth topic, the first truth. Before we begin to dig into this, it's important to clarify that identifying a first truth is not the result of a thoughtful research study, but instead a recognition of truth that has always existed. First truth is foundational truth that makes search, discovery, existence, and even thought possible in the first place. It is the silent initial axiom from which everything else flows.

SPEAKER_03 1:46

Foundational truth is the specific concept that anchors our existence, yet we often treat it as a finish line we haven't crossed rather than the starting block we're already standing on. It's the silent premise that makes logic, discovery, and even the active questioning possible in the first place. We live in an era where information is the primary currency. We're taught to verify, to fact-check, and to demand a peer-reviewed process for every claim. But there's a paradox here. Because any process we use to find truth already assumes that reality is fixed, that logic is consistent, and that existence itself is stable. If truth were merely the output of our investigations, we'd be living in a state of permanent fragility, always one new study or one expert opinion away from the ground vanishing beneath our feet.

SPEAKER_04 2:42

The distinction between truth as a discovery and truth as a foundation changes our entire emotional and intellectual posture toward the world. If we view truth as something we're constantly chasing, we're trapped in a cycle of anxiety. We feel like we have to manufacture meaning from scratch every single morning. But foundational truth isn't something we invent or even something that depends on our awareness of it. Gravity didn't wait for Isaac Newton to write Prancipia Mathematica in 1687 to start holding planets in orbit. Our recognition

Relief From A Stable Reality

SPEAKER_04 3:20

of a fact is not the cause of that fact. There's a profound relief in realizing that the order of the universe is prior to us. It suggests that reality isn't negotiable or waiting for our permission to be real.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Actually, uh, those are great comparisons to illustrate our subject. And to be clear, the principles I am presenting are not a new line of reasoning, they are components of classical philosophy. Thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas have wrestled with the concept of what is known or referred to as causality. They observed a simple, undeniable reality. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

SPEAKER_03 4:11

That idea of relief is interesting because modern culture often frames absolute freedom as the ability to self-invent without any pre-existing boundaries. We're told we can define our own reality, our own purpose, and even our own basic truths. But that kind of freedom can quickly turn into a weightless drift. Without a foundational truth to provide orientation, curiosity doesn't lead anywhere, it just becomes aimless wandering. We end up digging through chaos, hoping to scrape together enough fragments to build a temporary identity. It's like trying to navigate a ship in the middle of the ocean without a compass or stars, claiming the lack of direction is actually liberation. Eventually, the lack of fixed points makes it impossible to know if you're moving forward or just spinning.

SPEAKER_04 4:58

It's the difference between exploration and lostness. When we talk about a first cause or a foundational reality, we're talking about the ground floor that sustains everything else. In classical philosophy, thinkers like Aristotle and later Thomas Aquinas spoke about the unmoved mover or the first cause. They argued that if you trace any chain of events back, this caused that, which was caused by this, you cannot have an infinite regress. There must be a starting point that wasn't started by something else.

First Cause And False Freedom

SPEAKER_04 5:40

Whether we're looking at the Big Bang theory in physics, which posits a singular origin point for the universe, roughly 13.8 billion years ago, or logical axioms in mathematics, we always find ourselves leaning on something that is simply given. You can't prove the laws of logic using logic without first assuming the laws of logic are valid. That's a foundational truth.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Absolutely. The first truth leaves its signature upon everything we experience in creation. Understanding the first truth is crucial for fully and deeply understanding the world and the intricate environment in which we live. In truth, it's impossible to accurately understand the existence of our world while rejecting the truth of a first cause. It's like trying to understand a novel by insisting the author doesn't exist. You can analyze the characters, the plot, the language, but dismissing authorship alters the understanding of the intent, the purpose, and the meaning of the manuscript. So finding ways to understand the world we do not create, did not create, have no responsibility for without acknowledging a creator leaves us subject to the same outcomes.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

So if these truths are self-evident and prior to our experience, why do we struggle so much to acknowledge them? We often treat foundational truth as a phrase reserved for religious debates or high-level metaphysics, but it's actually much more practical than that. It's the reason we can trust that the sun will rise or that mathematical constants remain constant across the galaxy, yet we've developed a habit of treating all truth as subjective or provisional. We say my truth or your truth as if reality is a customizable software package. If we're always in a state of provisionality, we never actually settle. We're always scanning the horizon for the next piece of evidence that might overturn everything we thought we knew about being human.

SPEAKER_04 8:03

That's exactly why this conversation isn't about promoting a specific set of religious rituals or social ideologies. Foundational truth existed before there were denominations, before there were political parties, and before there were scientific journals. It's the stage upon which all those things perform. Even if someone rejects the idea of a creator or a spiritual dimension, they still act as if foundational truths exist. They step out of bed expecting the floor to be solid. They use language expecting words to carry shared meaning. This pursuit of the first truth is about identifying the bedrock that allows us to build a life. Everyone builds on something: achievement, relationships, a specific philosophy. But if that foundation isn't tied to what is objectively true, the structure won't hold when the environment gets chaotic.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Despina, I'm glad that you've drawn me into the conversation from that perspective. Embracing the truth of God's existence underpins the understanding of first truth. Now, while Christian theology certainly supports this premise, the argument for a first cause is not exclusively based on an ontological or theological perspective. Long before organized religion, the natural world itself established a

Why “My Truth” Never Settles

SPEAKER_00 9:30

powerful, intuitive connection to a deity. If we were to travel back into history to the dawn of human consciousness, we would find ancient civilizations standing under a canopy of more brilliant stars than we can even imagine today. And they recognize the existence of a higher being without prompting from any religion or theology. Creation stood as empirical evidence of powers and abilities far beyond their own human limits. Such things as the cycle of the sun, for example, creatures living in independent ecosystems, and of course the astonishing miracle of birth. Can you imagine the first birth that was witnessed by human eyes? These were not merely physical phenomenon. They were manifestations of an unseen power responsible for the world men could see.

SPEAKER_03 10:43

The idea that truth reveals why we support certain causes or why we value certain things is a complete reversal of how we usually think. We usually think our values determine our truth. We pick a side, a movement, or a cause, and then we go looking for the truths that support it. But if there is a foundational truth that is the cause of all things, then that truth is the standard by which our causes must be measured. It means truth isn't a tool we use to win an argument, it's the environment we're standing in. It doesn't need us to defend it to remain true. A person doesn't have to be an astrophysicist to be subject to the laws of the universe. The reality was there before we arrived, and it stays there after we're gone.

SPEAKER_04 11:31

And that's where the intellectual tension lies. If foundational truth is objective and prior to us, it means we don't have total autonomy over what is real. That's a hard pill for the modern ego to swallow. We want to be the authors of the story, not just characters in it. But acknowledging a first cause isn't about losing freedom. It's about gaining a reference point. Think of a pilot flying through thick clouds. If they rely on their own internal sense of up and down, they might experience spatial disorientation and fly straight into the ground. They have to trust the instruments, which are tied to the external foundational reality of gravity and the horizon. Foundational truth is the instrument panel for human existence. It's what keeps us from crashing when our feelings or the cultural climate get foggy.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Definitely, that's right. Fundamental truth is an anchor that will stabilize an entire generation if they embrace it. When a culture establishes and applies foundational truth, it serves as a guiding principle that shapes a generation. When a culture maintains its dominance amid shifting societal trends, the identities of its people and their historical significance continues to thrive and to exert influence on the uncoming generations that follow. However, when contemporary trends prompt individuals to weaken or forsake their ties and their bond to their cultural heritage, the once vibrant legacy now is in risk of fading into obscurity, ultimately, in some cases, disappearing altogether. The first truth offers an ultimate sense of security and assurance with a foundational reference that can be passed down through generations.

Values, Culture, And What Endures

SPEAKER_00 13:40

It provides answers to the most fundamental human questions. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? It suggests that our existence is not a cosmic accident, but a deliberate act of creation imbued with purpose. The highest form of this truth, the most profound and life-altering truth the culture can possess is the one that leads humanity back to its creator. It is the truth that completes the circle, the cycle, connecting the created back to the cause of its creation.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

It also changes how we view the unknown. Usually we're afraid of what we don't know because we feel like the unknown could contain something that invalidates our entire existence. But if we affirm a foundational cause, a first truth, then even the things we don't understand are still part of a coherent whole. We don't have to possess exhaustive knowledge to know that the universe operates on consistent principles. The goal isn't to comprehend every detail of the foundation, but to acknowledge that the foundation is there and that it's stable. It allows us to be comfortable with mystery without falling into nihilism.

SPEAKER_04 15:15

That's a vital distinction. Nihilism is what happens when you decide there is no foundation, so nothing means anything. Dogmatism is what happens when you claim to have mapped every square inch of the foundation, and anyone who sees it differently is wrong. But recognizing a first truth is a middle path. It's an admission that there is a source, a cause, and a reality that we didn't create, which invites us to study it with both rigor and humility. In science, this looks like the principle of uniformity, the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. Without that foundational truth, science would be impossible. You couldn't predict anything.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

So we are essentially affirming what I stated earlier that truth is not the conclusion of a long research process. You know, it's not the end of our own personal journey of discovery. Instead, it is the premise that has allowed us to even embark on such a journey, to even make uh certain discoveries. So meaning is discovered, it's not manufactured. So we don't get to use it to uh support individual branding or to curate our own reality because we are not the source of truth. We don't bend truth to our own will, our own personal perspective. Instead, we have to align ourselves with an existing standard. This is really the challenge for the the current culture and environment that we are in right now that is so uh committed and dedicated to the devaluation of truth, the elimination of truth, and to give everybody their own personal uh option to perceive truth based from their point of view. That's not sustainable. We all must understand that truth is an existing standard that we all must align ourselves with.

SPEAKER_03 17:51

If we aren't the source of truth, then we have a responsibility to align ourselves with it rather than trying to bend it to fit our preferences. This applies to ethics, to science, and to how we treat one another. If there is a foundational reality to what a human being is, then human rights aren't just a nice social contract we agreed upon, they're an acknowledgement of a pre-existing truth about our nature.

SPEAKER_04 18:21

Exactly. The historian Yuval Noah Herari often argues that things like human rights or money are imagined realities, things we all just agree to believe in so society works. But the concept of foundational truth suggests the opposite. It suggests that while our expressions of these things might change, they are pointing towards something that is fundamentally real. If we treat everything as an imagined reality, then power

Science, Ethics, And Power Checks

SPEAKER_04 18:50

becomes the only thing that matters. Whoever has the most power gets to decide what the truth is for everyone else. But if truth is foundational and objective, then even the most powerful person is subject to it. It provides a check on human ego and a basis for genuine justice that doesn't shift with the political winds.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

The sinkhole might look like solid ground for a while, but it's fundamentally unstable because it's hollow. A lot of modern life feels like we're decorating the interior of a house that's built on a sinkhole. We're very focused on the curtains and the paint colors, our social media presence, our career milestones, but we're ignoring the fact that the ground is shifting. Taking the time to identify the first truth is like doing a geological survey of your own life. It's asking, what is the thing that makes all this other stuff possible? And is that thing actually solid?

SPEAKER_04 19:59

Aaron Powell And that survey often leads people back to the idea of the first cause. Whether you approach it through the lens of the cosmological argument or through the sheer mathematical improbability of the universe's fine-tuning, you run into the reality that the world didn't have to exist, but it does. The fact that there is something rather than nothing is the ultimate foundational truth. Physicist Roger Penrose has calculated that the aim of the creator, or the precision required for the Big Bang to produce a life-sustaining universe, was accurate to one part in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. That is a number so large that if you wrote a zero on every single atom in the observable universe, you'd still run out of atoms before you finish writing the number. That level of order isn't an accident. It's a foundation.

SPEAKER_03 20:56

When you put it that way, it makes our daily anxieties about finding our truth seem almost trivial. Not in a way that dismisses our struggles, but in a way that puts them in perspective. We're part of a massive, intricately ordered reality that has been functioning since the beginning of time. Our role isn't to hold the whole thing together or to reinvent the laws of physics or morality. Our role is to recognize the truth, align with it, and then build something meaningful on top of it. It's a shift from being a creator of reality to being a participant in it. That shift might be the most practical thing a person can do to find actual stability.

SPEAKER_04 21:40

It turns the search for meaning into a journey of recognition. Instead of asking, what meaning can I create today? We start asking, what meaning is already here that I've been ignoring? It moves us away from that permanent provisionality you mentioned earlier. We can actually commit to things, to people, to ideas, to work, because we're building on ground that we trust won't disappear tomorrow. Foundational truth provides the constraints that actually make creativity possible. Just like a poet needs the constraints of language and rhythm to create a masterpiece, we need the constraints of foundational truth to create a life that actually holds weight.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

The stability that comes from that recognition helps us to understand that you can't grow a tree in a pot that you're gonna move every two hours.

Fine Tuning And Daily Stability

SPEAKER_00 22:40

You have to plant it in the ground and leave it there. Acknowledging the first truth is like planting ourselves so that then we can operate uh from a reality that is structured. We can understand that truth is objective and there's a cause and a purpose behind my existence. And from that fixed point where we have been planted, then we can, you know, branch out and we can experience uh uh life and and grow and bear fruit, if you will. But in all of what we do in in our expansion, we are always rooted and connected to that foundational truth that actually helps us to uh uh evaluate and to mitigate all of the experiences that we may have to make sure that they are still in alignment with the truth that we are growing out from. And so I think that that that solidarity that we can have as a uh civilization also helps us personally to stay rooted and connected so that we can be settled in the world that we live in and don't find ourselves so animated with chasing after things that are really distractions as opposed to attractions that help us to maintain our growth in the truth. This fundamental truth is the origin story where all truth begins. It's the premise to reach any truthful conclusion. And if you have found this perspective

Share The Podcast And Closing

SPEAKER_00 24:35

on the bedrock of reality helpful, we are hoping that you'll share this podcast with someone who's looking for a bit more stability in their life. And we hope that you'll join us for the next Truth About podcast.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Thank you for joining the Truth About Podcast today. Tune in for the new Truth About topic on our next episode.