On the Nature of Truth

Hey guyses!

Hope everyone’s had a great week. I know this week was quite busy for most people so well-done for making it through. I remember there was a point this week where I just almost had a breakdown, I was just so just exhausted all I wanted to do was cry : (Here are some notes for our discussion on “The nature of truth”. Doug is doing skepticism next week (if it’s anything like last year’s, we’re in for a treat)! Can people also please sign up for the rest of the term, but we’ll probably chat about it at this week’s meet? These notes aren’t very in-depth (this week’s been crazy) but hope they’ll help. This will probably be modified sometime soon though. Oh and please excuse the formatting, I did a cut-and-paste job from MS Word and it went a little wonky. Here goes…

Here are some key Scriptures to start us off:

Isaiah 45: 19 -I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain’. I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right.

Romans 3: 3, 4 – What if some did not have faith? Will their lack of faith nullify God’s faithfulness? Not at all! Let God be true and every man a liar.

Psalms 119: 160 – All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal.

2 Timothy 2:15 – Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

John 14: 16, 17 – And I will ask the Father and He will give you another Counsellor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you know Him for He lives with you and in you.

John 14: 6 – Jesus answered, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…

John 16: 13 – But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you in all truth.

Romans 1:25 – They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator.

2 Timothy 3: 7-9 – …always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth—men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

Ephesians 4:15 – Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ…

Ephesians 6:14 – Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist

John 8: 32 – Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Job 36:4 – Be assured that my words are not false; One perfect in knowledge is with you.

You can also do your own word search on “truth”, “knowledge” and “wisdom” but here are some more helpful scriptures:

Truth – Zechariah 8: 16; John 4: 24; John 16: 13, 14; 1 Corinthians 13: 6; 2 Thessalonians 2: 10; John 17: 3; Philippians 4: 8, 9; Revelations 22: 6; Psalm 51:6

Wisdom – James 1: 5; 1 Kings 4: 29; Psalm 111: 10; Proverbs 31: 26; Jeremiah 10: 12; Matthew 11: 19; Luke 2:52; Romans 11:33; Colossians 2: 3; 1 Kings 3: 12; 1 Corinthians 1: 27; Daniel 12: 3; 2Timothy 3:15

Knowledge – Deuteronomy18:21; Job 19: 25; Psalm 46:10; Romans 11:33; Jeremiah 24:7; Matthew 6: 3; Matthew24:32; John 3:11; 1John2:4; Psalms 19:2; Philippians3:8; 1John3:14; John 9: 25; Ecclesiastes 4: 7

Dictionary definition (we’ll come back to these somewhat very problematic definitions later):

= Truth is that which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence

= Conformable to fact; in accordance with the actual state of things; correct; not false, erroneous, inaccurate, or the like; as, a true relation or narration; a true history; a declaration is true when it states the facts

= Right to precision; conformable to a rule or pattern; exact; accurate; as, a true copy; a true likeness of the original

= A legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material

= Fidelity; constancy; steadfastness; faithfulness

= Fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience

= An obvious or accepted or verified fact; truism; platitude

As I’m sure we all know by now, without reducing and oversimplifying it, postmodernism is largely a response, no, rather a reaction to modernism, which has its roots in the Enlightenment/Age of Reason. Thinkers like Descartes propagated the notion that “We should reject all knowledge which is merely probable and judge that only those things should be believed which are perfectly known and about which there can be no doubts”. In his book, Discousre on Method, from whence the infamous saying “I think therefore I am” comes, he sought to create a science that would reduce all physical phenomena (and as his successors endeavoured to do, all “abstract” phenomena like the “science” of politics and sociology eg. Hobbes) to exact mathematical or fixed relationships. It was by reason that we ascertained what is clearly and distinctively true. Without going into much length about his theory (if anyone’s keen, I’ve got some useful material at home), it basically works like analytical geometry (anyone remember this from school)? Breaking a mathematical problem down into its simplest components, representing them by means of an equation and systematically solving it by logically figuring out the relations between them (please correct me if I’m wrong) Eg. If L=M and M=J, therefore L=J. In about 1687 Isaac Newton would successfully accommodate in his Pricipia both deductive reasoning (explained above by the whole Descartes schpeel) and inductive reasoning (experimental evidence); the two dominant “ways” of knowing truth until our post-modern era.

(Guys feel free to make these lists longer)

Postmoderns justifiably find fault with both these methods because:

1. Some “truths” cannot be adequately contained in a simplistic, fixed cause-and-effect relationship between physical matter. This narrow view of truth does not take into account the complex, dynamic, interconnected, and sometimes equally unfathomable and inexplicable relationships between physical and abstract dimensions of human existence.
2. Truth has often been used as a means of domination. Truth and power are invariably linked. Theories; naturalised, essentialised, absolutised and universalised have often been used to oppress those people who do not possess the means to create, disseminate and reproduce in society their perceived truth. This begs the questions: “what is truth”, “does it even exist”; “to what degree is shared knowledge subjective”; “who determines what truth is”; “who determines what it looks like” etc?E.g. Racism, chauvinism, exploitative capitalism, colonialism, religious crimes
3. What about the subjective nature of truth? Is there a universal truth, a “fundamental reality apart from transcending perceived experience” that is experienced in the same way universally?

Their response:

- “Rather postmodernism sees truth as inseparable from culture, psychology, race and gender. Ultimately, truth is what we make it to be” (Douglas R. Groothuis)

- “The ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH is that there are NO ABSOLUTE TRUTHS” (Feyerabend)

- “A piece of knowledge is never false or true – but only more or less biologically and evolutionary useful. All dogmatic creeds are approximations: these approximations form a humus from which better approximations grow…” (Ernst Mach)

- “Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it” (Bertrand Russell)

- ‘Truth’ is an organized formulation of energy, and is contextual, current, flexible … according to the individual who does the formulation, the group which does the formulation” (Taborsky)

- “All we can do is to search for the falsity content of our best theory. We do so by trying to refute our theory; that is, by trying to test it severely in the light of all our objective knowledge and all our ingenuity. It is, of course, always possible that the theory may be false even if it passes all these tests; that is allowed for by our search for verisimilitude. But if it passes all these tests then we may have good reason to conjecture that our theory, which (we know) has a greater truth content than its predecessor, may have no greater falsity content. And if we fail to refute the new theory, especially in fields in which its predecessor has been refuted, then we can claim this as one of the objective reasons for the conjecture that the new theory is a better approximation to truth than the old theory” (Popper)

- “We know only one source which directly reveals scientific facts – our senses” (Ernst Mach)

- “At the same time, however, some post-modern philosophers hold that the more we become aware of the arbitrary nature of reality, the more human consciousness is able to transcend and attain a quasi progress. They argue that we can and should construct our own meaning, and seek transcendence by rendering the familiar strange [“alterity” I should think]. In making society increasingly aware of its constructedness, the self goes beyond what is used to believe, and so transcends. For the ethical self, moreover, this transcendence should be an ateleological project, since a totalising explanation of reality is seen as ultimately damaging to society” (SOAR Worldview seminar booklet)

- rejection of all meta-narratives but relative “truths”

- truth and knowledge are constructed

- reject the value-judgements and meanings associated with so-called established truth

- language cannot be trusted and cannot suffice to communicate truth; therefore all texts which claim to be authoritive and accurate “carriers” of truth are deceptive, crazy, harmful and irrelevant (what’s this called again, an extended metaphor, so out of touch with English language rules?)

Amazing aspects of these views:

- quick to question and point out the flaws and power-dynamics in long-accepted “nonsensical” theories pawned as truths eg. Darwinian evolution and its subsequent evil of biological racism

- seek experience to back up claims

- openness to new “knowledge”, “understanding” and interpretations

- much room for creativity: “we can pretty much imagine anything as being true”

Practical Outworkings:

Eg. A system’s view of life.

Eg eg. Eco-feminism which holds to the rather complex interrelatedness of nature and women. So the current global ecological crisis (problems and solutions) can also be tied theoretically, philosophically and scientifically to our changing perceptions of women and vice versa (hope this reads sense). This presupposes a ‘feminised’ nature – Gaia (which is a modern-day reworking of the image and accompanying worldview of the ancient Greek’s worship of Gaia – the Earth Mother). ‘Gaia refers to the earth as a living, interconnected system…Suggesting that the Earth is constituted as a system of interacting forces regulated by the biota carries the companion suggestion that the Earth is an organism’ (Potts, 2003: 31).

Eg. Reality and quantum physics – see links under “resources”.

Eg. Christianity and culture

Eg. The Emerging Church – see www.apolegeticsindex.org for articles which provide an overview

Eg. Value-free/neutral judgements: To label an act or opinion a manifestation of good judgment is to imply that one knows: (a) the true state of the political world; the values that should guide decision-makers in coping with the world. Neither implication is usually justified. “A more interesting variant of the judges attempt to make value-free value judgments is the “unanimity principle,” recently emphasized by James M. Buchanan. Here the idea is that the judge can safely advocate a policy if everyone in the society also advocates it. But, in the first place, the unanimity principle is still subject to the aforementioned strictures: that, even if the judge simply shares in everyone else’s value judgment, he is still making a value judgment. Furthermore, the superficial attractiveness of the unanimity principle fades away under more stringent analysis; for unanimity is scarcely sufficient to establish an ethical principle. For one thing, the requirement of unanimity for any action or change begins with and freezes the status quo”.

Christianity and truth – what the Bible says:

- The Bible is the final authority on all truth, applicable to all areas of human life and in relation to everything else in the cosmos; although not exhaustive, it is sufficient (we’ll be looking at the authority and authenticity of the Bible as a text, and maybe even hermeneutics, later on this year or term rather)!

- Again language may not be able to fully convey the extensive meaning of every truth under the sun, however it is adequate.

- Truth is accumulative and not simply contradictory or “degenerative”.

- God is the author of all truth ( you know the saying: “all truth is God-truth”) and Jesus its embodiment; man is therefore not the originator of any truths but simply a discoverer of those truths: – “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings” (Proverbs 25: 2)_ “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1: 9).

- “We can know because God wants us to know. He has communicated Himself to us through the Word - the logos. Logos means communication or intelligence and is where we derive the word logic from” (SOAR Worldview seminar booklet). ie. Think Isaiah 45: 19: “I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain’. I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right”.

- Rejects both the blind dogmatism that has characterised some movements in the past, and ineffectual radical skeptism. God is Truth and is not insecure about possibly contradicting Himself and coming off looking bad as the liar or fantasy we always suspected He was. Instead the Bible says:“Test everything. Hold on to the good” (1 Thessalonians 5: 21). Most important, however is that we use the Bible (His word, His truth) as our guide, as our beginning and ending points. “Rationality can give us knowledge, but cannot give us authorative and final truth. This comes from revelation from God, found objectively in the Bible and subjectively through experiences, prophesies and even nature. The objective always judges the subjective” (SOAR Worldview seminar booklet).

If you’re interested in the notion of alterity (but we will be looking at post-modern ethics later on in the year), you can look at this great article entitled: “Alterity and Faith in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics”, but like all internet sources, read with caution : )

Oh there’s also a book called Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl (1998) by Depraz, N.; Zahavi, D. (Eds.)

I also have some stuff on Descartes and Newton and those Enlightenment guys if anyone needs. Another resource –Truth Decay: Defending Christianity against the challenges of Postmodernism by Douglas R. Groothuis.

Oh ya for the discussion, could we maybe chat a bit about the postmodern view on truth (if we can call it that), but spend the bulk of the time getting our apologetics groove on, looking at the practical outworkings of postmodernism and zooming in on possible ways to rebut the claims of this worldview? Maybe we can also get a scribe to write down what we come up with and post it on the blog? Oh could everyone also bring along a copy of their timetable so we can sort out the time issue? Thanx a mill and otherwise see you all at the meet and much much much love… Nonx