What is Truth?

post 064

Recently in The Truth Project (*1) I was confronted with the question; “What is truth?”
At the time, I was not as interested in the answer as I was curious about the question itself.
Absolutely everyone knows what truth is…. Until asked to define it.
Ask yourself, “What is truth?” and you find your mind stumbling for the right words to explain what you are sure you know for fact, then you think, and you discover you really are not sure what truth is.
Go ahead ask yourself right now, write it down, I’ll wait.

* * *

In all confidence you probably gave lots of explanations, which turned out to be attributes, or events, but not actually defining truth.
Why is a word that is so familiar to us, so hard to explain, even to ourselves?
The more I thought about this, the more the answer itself seemed important.
After wrestling with the question and the answer for a few days, I showed up at my local community coffee shop in the morning, which is a regular daily winter routine with several locals.
It went like this;

“I have been thinking about a question that has got me stumped, so I want to run it by you and get your input, OK?”
“I need to know, WHAT IS TRUTH?”
One local liberal man we’ll call him Chip, blurted out;
“Truth is what it is.”
I said, I needed a better definition.
Another, in law enforcement, we will call Andy said;
“Truth is a person’s perception of reality.”
I asked; “you like that definition?"
He affirmed in confidence, so I wrote that on my paper place-mat.
I then asked;
“How can you and I both have different truth?”
As we discussed it more he included;
“Truth varies from person to person.”
And later in our conversation, he added;
“There is no definition of truth beyond perception.”
And; “Truth is not an absolute.”
So with his agreement I summed up his answers by writing;
“Truth is human perception.”
The owner and cook came out of the kitchen and agreed with this definition confidently. And the waitress hesitantly agreed as well.
My constant question returned often;
“How can there be more than one truth? Isn’t truth more foundational than opinion?”
The answer was;
“Truth has too many variables to define it clearly.”
At this point Chip got up shaking his head as if to say; The question is ridiculous and not worth my time. And he left.
After expressing my belief that Truth must be more than imagination, Andy explained it to me like this;
“We know now that the world has always been round, but men of the past thought it was flat and so the truth for them was that it was flat.”
So changing tactics, I asked,
“What is Fact?”
and without a hesitation Andy answered;
“The ultimate truth.”
“So!” I said; “If there is ultimate truth, anything less that that must not be truth.”
The word Ultimate indicates that truth is more concrete than opinion. If we look deep enough we can find what (ultimate) truth actually is. Therefore when something does not agree with ultimate truth, it cannot be truth.”
“What is the truth, if I drop my coffee cup to the floor; will it break?”
As long as we only TALK about a truth, it remains in the theory stage and we can both feel we are right. you say it wont, I say it will, yet neither of these are more than opinion until tested.
But when I drop my coffee cup on the floor, the truth will be revealed.
You call it ultimate truth, my truth, observed truth. You add all kinds of verbs to the word to try to define the intensity of the truth. These verbs tend to indicate at some point the truth can be known as fact. My truth may be less true than your truth, which is less true than ultimate truth?

At this point, both the cook and waitress said their heads hurt and wanted the conversation to end.
And I went home to think some more.
Is truth simply variable and therefore meaningless?
I think by nature when pressed we find that truth must be more than that.
How do I find out; “What is truth?”

I got out my dictionary, a Webster’s Collegiate 5th edition dated 1948. It said;
Truth
1. Quality or state of being true; hence:
a. Archaic. fidelity; constancy.
b. Veracity; sincerity; genuineness.
c. Agreement with that which is represented; correspondence to reality; verisimilitude.
d. Conformity to rule; exactness; correctness.
2. That which is true; that which conforms to fact or reality; that which is or is characterized by being in accord with what is, which has been, or must be; as, to seek the truth; the truths of science.

Here is my 2001 Merryman-Webster electronic dictionary:
Truth
1. Truthfulness, honesty
2. The real state of things: fact
3. The body of real events or facts: actuality
4. A true or accepted statement or proposition
5. Agreement with fact or reality: correctness.

There seems very little here to include; imagination, opinion, assumption, faith, or hope.
Truth appears to be very definitive. There are no verbs to add validity or type of truth.
‘My truth’, ‘your truth’, ‘perceived truth’ are even less than limitations on truth; the attached verb shows that the perception of the perceived truth must be less than true.
If it does not represent fact of reality, it is not truth, so to say “my truth” suggests some variation of what is actually reality, which then cannot be true.

So why do so many Americans today have such a strange view of truth?
Where do such views originate?
Recently I listened to a podcast from the apologist Ravi Zacharias (*2)
Although the podcast did not even seem to touch this topic, I was amazed to see it answer this question.

The Christian religion holds firmly to the perspective that truth by its very nature, is exclusive of all else. If ‘this’ is true, then ‘that’ is not true. “Either/Or” is the nature of truth. This is why the world sees Christianity as narrow minded, bigoted, and restricting, when in fact it is represented by all reality.
In America, all of our culture, all of our laws, all of our perspectives, have been built and successfully administered with this Either/OR approach to life.

Looking at the Hindu religion of India, they hold the view; god is everything and everything is God. From this pantheistic perspective any view is as equally correct, even if conflicting; good, bad, this or that, it is all god. In this way everything is true. It is the "This and That" approach.

I try to grant every view an opportunity to prove itself, so this perspective deserves to be honestly evaluated; after all, Hinduism has grown to become the world's third largest religion, after Christianity and Islam.Hinduism
But this perspective seems to hold water only as long as it isn’t tested in reality.
As Ravi expressed so well; “Even in India we look both ways when we cross the street, it is either me or the bus, not both.”
The incredible poverty in the streets of India side by side with the wealthy, is a clear example of this perspective in action. "I am rich, you are starving, that is Karma, therefore we should not try to change it."

But this religious perspective comes very close to the new American idea that truth is whatever you think it is.
I believe this thinking is now possible in America, and promoted by our infatuation with fantasy through TV, movies and video games. Most Americans spend a huge percentage of their lives in fantasy, where this kind of thinking cannot be proven wrong.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so this adaptation of unfamiliar views is assured, once the original faith is rejected as ours was by removing our God from our schools and our government in 1963.
Vice President Joe Biden can honestly believe that “America must spend money to keep from going bankrupt ", but tested against reality in history and practice, this idea proves to be folly. In the movies you can out run a title wave, hold your breath underwater for as long as you need, get shot at point blank by a machine gun but not get hurt, then take out your opponent with a single round from a pistol while you are tumbling for cover! In the world of the Matrix, reality as we know it means nothing, Therefore truth has no meaning either.

Once a person decides truth has nothing to do with reality, then anything is potentially possible, and any opposition is just negative! Lets try it and hope it will work, be positive!

But Americans used to know what foolishness was. And how did they know that?
Because Americans believed in the concept that there is only one truth, and we must find that truth.
This is a basic of nature, of science, of reality. Originally this was the platform and purpose for scientific discovery, to find what is true. Today the History and Science channels have been taken over by the SciFi channel.
Strangely enough, Jesus gave us our original logic when he said; “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the father, but by me.” John 14:6 This is the Either/OR approach. Not unfair, just the way it is.
Reject this truth, and you reject logic. Because IF Jesus is the creator of the known universe as the bible says, (John 1:3) then rejecting him, rejects truth.
Are we seeing the evidence of this truth by this new bizarre concept of ‘pantheistic truth’ in America?

* * * * * * *

*1 The Truth Project
http://www.thetruthproject.org/ is an amazing walk through why America works. Very worth your time!
*2 I highly recommend Ravi’s podcasts for the thinking mind: Let my People Think Podcasts
http://www.rzim.org/rss/rss-lmpt.aspx