What Is Truth? Can We Know Truth?

Introduction:

Today I am asking you to be philosophers. I hate to have to do that because philosophers have to think very hard, and it hurts most people’s heads to do so. But the question today is a philosopher’s kind of question, and it cannot be avoided if we want to think about why we, or anyone else, should believe the Christian faith.

I say this because, if faith has the meaning that we found in the first lesson, then when we say, "I believe the Christian faith" we are really saying, "I believe that the Christian faith is true." A hundred, maybe even fifty, years ago, this wouldn’t have required any further examination.

But today it has become a point where the question "Why believe?" sometimes never even gets off the ground, so to speak, because there are several, competing, conflicting ideas about what it means for something to be true.

Well over 150 times the New Testament uses some form of aletheia, and this is not the only word used in the New Testament to indicate the idea of something being "true." While there are several senses in which we use the word "true," clearly the most important one, as in the New Testament, is when a statement or claim is said to be true. Truth is what came by Jesus Christ. When Jesus was about to say something that "went against the grain" of those around Him, He was fond of beginning with the word "amen." "Amen" is essentially the Greek version of the Hebrew word for "truth." It is translated in the NIV, "I tell you the truth." God must be worshiped in truth. Knowing the truth is what Jesus said will set us free. It is the truth, Paul says, that some exchanged for a lie. It is the truth that must be spoken in love by the church. So you can see that the concept of "truth" is a key element in the Christian faith.

So we can’t even get at Christianity until we can surmount the modern truth hurdle.

The truth about truth

You might remember that in the gospels, when Pontius Pilate wanted to avoid the force of what Jesus was saying, he tried to pretend he didn’t know what truth was. (John 18:36-38) Some in our time have taken this a step further. They have tried to re-define truth in a way that it loses its force.

One very old, and very reasonable, definition of truth is that truth is any statement that describes reality accurately. Even before the time of Jesus, the philosopher Aristotle said that truth is "saying of what is, that it is; and saying of what is not, that it is not." And when you look at the Old Testament, which is long before Aristotle, you find the writers there assuming that same definition, even though they never explicitly define it. (But that is not surprising, because they weren’t writing philosophy - at least most of the time!)

But that definition of truth does not leave a lot of "wiggle room" for those who would like to evade the force of reality. So there have been rival definitions suggested. We are going to examine the two most important of these.

Alternative #1: truth is personal, tailored to the individual, you have yours and I have mine, so there is no truth for everyone, everywhere. So truth is not discovered, rather, it is invented. This is sometimes called relativism.

Long ago, Plato attacked this re-definition of truth. (Theaetetus) He has Socrates discussing truth with a follower of Protagoras who thinks "true" means "true-for-the-individual." What Plato points out is that on almost every point there are those who hold conflicting views of what is true. But on the view that truth is "truth-for-the-individual," two or more inconsistent views can be "true" - which is at best a very weird result.

The even more devastating problem for relativism is that it cannot be very helpful in any important sense. Most people have some intuition of this. Can it be true for everyone that truth is relative for everyone? Do you see the problem here? People who are steeped in relativism can "hear" these words, and yet their force won’t always sink in. I have talked to people who have said things like, "We all know that everyone has his own truth." When you ask, "Is that statement true for everyone, or just for you?" you will sometimes short-circuit the person’s mind. Sometimes you almost have to "blow up" a relativist to get him to recognize this problem. Recognized or not, relativism self-destructs.

Alternative #2: truth is exclusively about results. A statement is true when it gets you what you (or we) want. This is called functionalism.

The most famous version of a results definition of truth is pragmatism. Pragmatists say that truth is whatever brings positive, practical results in life. Pragmatists are famous for saying things like this: "Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events." The events that make an idea true, according to pragmatists, are those positive results in life.

The problem with pragmatism is that it has no way to define "positive." While we might think we just know what results are "positive" in life, that is not always clear. Is getting rid of an unwanted group of people by genocide "positive"? While you might say no, how can a pragmatism show us this? Pragmatism is just too vague to be meaningful as a definition of truth.

Pragmatism is very American. Some try to tie this in with a defense of the Christian faith. For example, you sometimes hear, "Try Christianity and see if it doesn’t work for you." If you think that sounds pretty good, you are a typical American. As we just said, one problem is with being more clear about exactly what "works for you" means. But apart from that, ask yourself this: is it true because "it works for you," or does it "work for you" because it is true? If the latter, then we have not arrived a good definition of truth.

The definition of truth that does not have these problems is the one that says truth is an accurate description of reality. (It is also the definition of truth that clearly seemed to be assumed by the writers of the Biblical documents.)

Knowing the truth

Truth vs. Knowledge

It is one thing to come to a good definition of truth. But having done that, we still have more work to do because we want to be able not just to define it, but also to detect truth.

Anyone can entertain an idea. Philosophers call entertaining an idea a "belief" (which is a very different use of the word than we find in scripture - we mentioned this last time). When we say that someone "knows" something we mean more that just entertaining an idea. What is that "something more?"

That "something more" is called "justification" in the study of knowledge. Justification is the evidence that shows a belief to be true. If someone holds a belief, even if it happens to be true, we don’t count it as knowledge unless it is held with good justification.

Tests for Truth -- So what sorts of things make for good justification for our beliefs? In other words, how can one go about determining whether or not a statement accurately describes a state-of-affairs? What makes for good justification for beliefs - good enough so they become knowledge? Several techniques have been proposed. We turn to some of those now.

Socially-oriented tests for truth

There have been, and are, all sorts group-based tests for truth

Custom/tradition - here habitual patterns of behavior and belief of a group of people is used as a truth-detector. Of course, traditions can involve the truth, but there are plenty of traditions that involve falsehood. It is customary (with my Mother, for example) to think that the "common cold" is caused by being cold. This is false, though I am not sure if everyone's mothers have been convinced! If a tradition is based on truth, then someone at sometime found some way to compare it to the way things really are! So a better test than tradition is the method that person who started a true tradition used, whatever it might have been.

No Christian can afford to be unaware of the danger of adopting tradition as a test for truth. Jesus warned against missing truth by insisting upon tradition. Most people find tradition comfortable simply because it is much easier that the hard work of reasoning through positions. In other words, thinking can be hard work, and the appeal to tradition allows us to be lazy. But it is not an adequate test for truth.

"Everybody thinks it"or sometimes "everybody believes it"

Of course, there is very little, perhaps NOTHING, that has been agreed upon by EVERYONE, even at a given time. Another problem is that most "everybody" views have been known to 'flip-flop," that is, change over a time to an opposite. The spirit of one age is seldom the same as the spirit of another age. It is rather humorous to watch the "reporters" of news, politicians, and others shift with the latest fad ideas.

But the mere fact that lots of people believe something has only the shakiest connection to it being true. If lots of people believe something for good reasons, we would be much better off to go after those reasons as a test for truth.

The Experience of Our Senses

Why not just check out the accuracy of each description of a state-of-affairs by going to have a look or a listen - or whatever fits in a case?

There is no good reason to just assume that everything is physical. There could be things and conditions that we can’t see, hear, or sense in any way. (We could call this assumption "naturalism." It is very popular in some times and places, but it has serious problems. More on that as we proceed.)

Also, experience is not always reliable. Since the mind is capable of constructing imagined states-of-affairs that seem real, and because the senses can be deceived (straight stick appears crocked in the water) sense experience is not always reliable test for truth.

NOW this does not mean that sense experience has no place in testing for truth. But it does have limits and it does not seem to be able to stand alone. Consider also that much of what we actually experience -- colors, sounds, orders, tastes, and textures which must be INTERPRETED. Finally, notice that we are aware of the errors of our senses. If we have catch our senses making errors - and it seems that we do this now and then - it points to the idea that there are other ways to test for truth which we use to evaluate even sense experience!

Reason

There are some basic, undeniable principles of reason or logic. The most important of these is the principle of contradiction. There are two kinds of contradiction

Internal - A statement contradicts itself by both affirming and denying the same thing at the same time and in the same way. "This bachelor is married" cannot be true because it has an internal contradiction.

External - Two statements contradict one another if there is no way for both to be true at the same time. Consider these two claims: "At least one oak tree is now growing in my yard" and "No oak trees are now growing in my yard." If the first claim is true, the second must be false, and vise versa. While we are not doing a whole course on logic here - a very neglected subject these days - do keep in mind that you have to be careful when identifying contradictions. Some things that at first appear to be contradictions are not. Consider: "Jesus met two blind men on the road to Jerico at a certain time" AND "Jesus met a blind man named Bart on the road to Jerico at that certain time."

Coherence - If a statement is true, it must be reasonably (logically) compatible with all the other true statement we know.

So there is a place for both the senses and for reason as we test for truth. But does this mean that we can justify claims only when we sense the evidence or reason our way to it? This was the mistake made by some of the modern era who tried to rule out the Christian faith as unreasonable. This means that we must remember how elements of reasonable trust are involved in many things we know.

There is so much that we cannot investigate for ourselves directly.

All the events of the world at this moment that are outside my very limited view are beyond my ability to investigate directly.

All the events of the past are forever beyond my ability to investigate direction.

All the conclusions in fields outside my very limited expertise are beyond my ability to investigate directly.

This means that MOST of what we claim to know is based on faith. I don’t know much about cars, including brakes, but I accept the testimony of my mechanic that mine are in good working order. I didn’t witnessed what happened around the world today, but there are some news reporters whose testimony I accept by faith. I don’t know squat about medicine, but I accept what my doctor says by faith.

This does NOT mean that faith is uncritical. I should accept the reports of those whom I believe only if I have good reason to think that they know that of which they speak. How do they know? By the input from their senses and/or by their use of reason. If I know a reporter spent the day in New York and yet he reports that he was present to witness atrocities in the Middle East today, I should be skeptical.

"Religious" faith then is not something foreign to the categories of truth and knowledge. It can be thought of as a kind of knowledge (justified belief, remember) in which the justification is the testimony of a reliable reporter.

The reporter can be human witnesses, as in the case of the resurrection of Jesus.

The reporter could be God Himself, as He reveals to the Apostles and prophets matters that we could never investigate, perhaps never even guess about, but that He knows as the Creator of the universe.

So part of the task of apologetics is to show that the reports of the Christian faith are reliable testimony from those in a position to know of which they speak.

Faith and certainty

Whenever we are going to argue for a position, we need to begin by trying to decide the terms or conditions of the debate.

We want to know, first of all, what will count for proof for our position. In other words, if you want me to prove that Christianity is true, I need to know what you require for proof.

A key mistake often made here is requiring some special higher level of evidence or proof for Christianity than for other important matters in life.

Logically speaking, very few statements are completely beyond any doubt. The few that are usually come in the areas of definitions and mathematics. I can't possibly doubt the statement "all bachelors are unmarried males" because of the definition of the term "bachelors." I can't possibly reasonably doubt that 1+1=2.

But few if any statements about happenings in the world or matters of fact are totally beyond any doubt. For example, the statement, "The sun will rise in the east tomorrow." is, to say the least, a pretty safe bet. But it is at least possible that it is not true: we will find out tomorrow!

Some try to require that to have proof for "religious" issues we must have evidence that makes our case "true beyond any doubt." This, of course, can't be done for matters of fact, which is what we are claiming Christianity involves. And it is not really fair to require this because we don't require it for other very important matters in life.

Most of life's everyday decisions are based upon evidence that is in the probability category.

Even for life and death matters, such as a trial involving a capital crime and the death penalty, we don't go beyond "true beyond reasonable doubt."

So it should not surprise us that we are dealing with probability in the Christian faith.

What we see, then, is that we make decisions in life based on various degrees of probability. This is the best that can be done when dealing with matters of fact.

Thus, when making a case for the Christian faith, we cannot transcend probability. We hope to show that Christianity is "probably true" or at best "true beyond reasonable doubt." This is the case for most matters of fact, and if we think Christianity deals with any matters of fact, this will be the case for Christianity as well.