Philosophy
Truth [A Quick and Dirty Guide]
What is truth? And does anybody have a lock on it?
The preacher? The scientist? The scholar? The engineer? The psychologist? The shaman?
Furthermore, can you trust them?
Not easy questions to answer.
There are so many competing claims and different approaches.
Can we REALLY know the truth? I think we can. And to help me answer that question, a while back I asked my friend Rob Powell to help.
He agreed and knocked out three posts on truth: Absolutism, Pluralism and Scientism. [See below.]
I then pulled together seven more posts dealing with the question “what is truth?”
Perhaps you’ve seen them before. If so, skim through each for a little refresher course on truth.
If you haven’t seen these posts before, walk through them slowly and then let me know what you think.
In the end, we might disagree. My hope is that I at least get you to think. And I promise to do the same for you. Enjoy the list!
Absolutism [What You Need to Know--and Why] Is truth absolute? Or is it relative and merely based on personal preferences? There has to be a right answer, right? There is.
Pluralism [What You Need to Know--and Why] On the surface pluralism seems like a reasonable explanation for the diversity of faiths we see. Look below the surface and it’s not.
Scientism [When You Shouldn't Trust a Scientist] Science is awesome. It provides us with great party tricks and is the most predictable way to study the world. But what is it? And can it ever go wrong?
The Blind Men and a Queer Animal In an ancient parable, dozens of hermits and scholars are making conflicting claims about reality. Who was right? D. None of the above.
How to Deal with Religious Conflict What beliefs create peaceful behavior and deal with the discord of religion? Here’s the answer.
Is the Gospel What the World Desperately Needs? Only Christian salvation can lead to a humble, enemy-embracing love that the world desperately needs. Sound counter intuitive? Let me explain why it’s not.
The Blissfully Plastic Moral Base of Humanism What does the meaningless, value-absent creed of humanism have to offer? It might surprise you.
Hard Questions: How to Make Sense of the World Answer these seven questions and you’ll discover what’s at the bottom of all your thoughts about God, yourself and the world.
What Camus and Frankl Can Teach You about the Meaning of Life Is it possible to find meaning in life without God? Albert Camus and Victor Frankl think so.
Is Jesus the Only Way to God? [Guest post at Sorting Beans] Great question. It’s one I’ve often struggled with and felt very awkward at times defending. Here’s what I’ve found.
Scientism [When You Shouldn't Trust a Scientist]
![Magician Scientism [When You Shouldnt Trust a Scientist]](http://www.fallenandflawed.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Magician.jpg "Magician")
**Guest post by Rob Powell. Part of a series on truth.**
Science is awesome.
It provides us with marvelous party tricks, incredible fiction, and is the most predictable way to study and classify the world around us.
But other than a seven letter word, what exactly is science?
And more importantly, why for the last 300 years have some people thought it to be the sine non qua?
Defining Science
Stealing a page from Theodore Beale and PZ Myers let’s define science as such:
Scientage: the body of transparently obtained testable knowledge
Scientistry: what scientists learn to do at universities
Scientody: the method of exploring the world, observing, inferring, and testing with experimentation
Conversely here’s what science isn’t: an all encompassing worldview that can explain everything and should as such rule with an iron caliper over all other information.
That is scientism.
And oddly enough it fails just like it’s pals relativism and pluralism.
See, the proposition that one shouldn’t believe something unless it can be proven scientifically can’t itself be proven scientifically.
So where might dogmatic faith in these three forms of science lead us astray? It’s easiest to show the inherent bias of scientistry because all of us have had a professor with a chip on his or her shoulder.
Let’s take a look.
When Scientistry Fails
The Achiles heel of scientistry is that it’s carried out by fallen and flawed people. People who want fame. People who want to make politicians and drug makers happy so they can keep their grant money. People who are ideologues. People who will fudge or select for the data that proves their point…
And professors who will pass their grad student because they’re blonde and cute and have incriminating evidence against them.
Unfortunately confidence in the scientific method can’t lead to confidence in the scientist who claims to have used it.
The failure of scientistry leads to the fallibility of scientage.
The Collapse of Scientage
The scientific body of knowledge is supposed to be verifiable and transparent, but…is it always?
What if a paper submitted for publication refutes the chief editor’s research?
Science often turns a corner based on rogue ideas but what if it goes against the popular consensus? Will something novel get a hearing on it’s merits or be dismissed as pseudo science?
What if the data gets lost? What if there are a few idiot scientists all patting each other on the back approving each other’s work but nobody is guarding the hen house?
The failure of scientistry and scientage leave us only with scientody, which fortunately is very predictable. But the fact that scientody works at all is good evidence for a designer to the universe.
The Limits of Scientody
Christianity’s framework of an orderly and testable world led to science’s earliest successes.
Furthermore, scientody is good at answering the why and how questions of life. Unfortunately it’s completely silent as to the “so what?”
It will answer what happens if saline is injected into amniotic fluid but says nothing about whether that action is moral.
It lets you know what to expect if you create a supercritical mass of enriched uranium but could care less if you do that on Bikini Island or NYC.
It tells us predictable ways to build bridges–but not where those bridges should go.
What is the purpose of life? Is it better to give or receive?
Why are waffles so delicious?
The important questions of life that you ask your mom and best friend advice for cannot be put in a test tube.
Which brings us to another point. Science by definition has nothing to say about the supernatural.
Science Silent on the Supernatural
It would be scientismific! to demand scientific proof for God. However, the truth is that if Jesus was raised on the third day there is no way to go back and repeat the experiment to verify.
We are going to have to use other means of investigation to find that truth.
But aren’t scientists really smart with their thick glasses, pocket protectors, and such?
Sure!
But just because you invented the internet doesn’t mean you’re right about climate change, ultimate reality or same sex marriage.
Here’s a hint of when science is heading toward questionable grounds: Emotion.
There’s no emotion available in scientody.
Why All the Hatred, Guys?
The vitriol displayed toward religion by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, and other militant atheists is just misguided scientistry. It betrays their biases.
Science doesn’t go from a useful tool to a world view without introducing bias, presuppositions, and error.
The farther you get from scientody into scientistry the more emotion rules. For example, physicists are using the LHC on the border of France and Switzerland to among other things find the Higgs Boson.
If they can’t find one it will undermine 100 years of particle physics thinking.
But why haven’t we seen any physicists writing lay books or giving snarky interviews on the Today show? Because the LHC might create a micro black hole that destroys the earth.
But if it fails to find a Higgs Boson it won’t point to God.
Joseph Stalin’s Spin on Religion
Now consider the theories of anthropogenic global warming and evolution by natural selection. In some circles just calling those things “theories” and not “facts” is fighting words!
But why all the acrimony?
If evolution via natural selection [not as a process where giraffes get longer necks but whereby every living thing came to be] is NOT true then the world must have a designer.
But where are the scientists painting cheetah’s day glow orange and seeing if they can still bring the thunder down on a gazelle and make baby cheetahs?
It may be a grand theory produced by scientistry but it’s not really subject to scientody.
So why is science so mad at and scared of Christianity? Consider what Joseph Stalin had to say: “The Party cannot be neutral toward Religion because Religion is something opposite to Science.”
Unfortunately, I just don’t see the grand battle that Joe did.
Heck, if anybody ought to be mad around here it should be Pluto (Chin up little buddy, you’re still a planet to me).
Final Thoughts
Adam’s first job was to classify all the living creatures. And the author of Ecclesiastes had a handle on the water cycle but still thanked God for the rain.
An orderly and predictable world is a necessity for science. As long as science does what it does well (and the same must be said for religion, too) I see no conflict at all.
It’s when these boundaries are crossed and science is seen as the only arbiter of truth that conflict arises.
Science can be a useful tool in subduing the earth. When it goes from being a tool to a worldview it steps in to territory it’s not designed or equipped to handle.
In the end, when people turn to scientism it’s usually an attempt to justify one’s own belief, which is pride and needs to be repented of.
Pluralism [What You Need to Know--and Why]
**Guest post by Rob Powell. Part of a series on truth.**
In continuing our discussion about truth and absolutism let’s move to how that idea intersects with the wide diversity of faiths represented in our world, specifically in the concept called “pluralism.”
We’ve all heard the allegory of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant.
Each man describes a completely different animal based on what part they are feeling.
The moral of the story is that each is relating just a small but true part of a larger truth.
This parable is a feel good way to reconcile the differences between the thousands of different religions in society.
In fact, somebody should make a song out of it so they can add a verse to It’s a Small World.
Pluralism: The Good and the Bad
On the surface pluralism seems like a reasonable explanation for the diversity of faiths we see.
Nobody gets their feelings hurt by being told they are wrong and everybody gets to do what they think is true.
A little deeper inspection though shows that just like relativism this view falls apart under it’s own weight.
To allow all these discordant faiths to agree the pluralist has to do a few things, but first let’s take a look where faiths disagree.
Do All Religions [Basically] Agree? Eh, No.
To make that less than a 2 year doctoral thesis we’ll limit our discussion to the most populous religions.
Not that numbers equals truth but even the most PC pluralist isn’t going to say that the Heaven’s Gate Cult or the Branch Davidians has a truth claim equally as valid as Buddhism or Islam.
Bottom line: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism all have a diagnosis for what is wrong with humanity and a cure to fix it.
It’s past the scope of this article to delve into all the differences but they are not insignificant. Here are a few:
The number of gods. Some religions believe there is no God while others believe in only one and still others embracing many.
The problem of sin. All religions describe a very different program to curing sin.
The body and mortality. Each religion seeks to explain the purpose behind our bodies and solve the riddle of death.
In all these examples, the cures range from faith in Christ, to an esoteric experience where we see we are immaterial self aware beings with all knowledge or to realizing that all we are is fleeting conscious states.
The pattern here is clear.
There are a diversity of perceived spiritual problems–and a myriad of just as diverse solutions.
What We Must Avoid
To try and boil all this down and just say that people are broken and need a cure would be as silly as saying a person has “sick” and needs “better”.
If your appendix has ruptured you will not find a doctor that recommends in vitro fertilization.
Each specific diagnosis needs a specific remedy.
Maybe the pluralist believes that God will save those not of a certain tradition based on how they responded to what knowledge they had accessible to them. For example, the Christian God might save Buddhists because they were sincere in their belief.
Unfortunately this is not what ANY of these individual faiths teach. Also, past just the general diagnosis, religions disagree on what makes up a human.
What the Pluralist Must Do to Make Religions “Agree”
Do we have an enduring soul or are we merely a collection of momentary states? Either people come in two (or more) distinct flavors or you have to believe these both of these self contradicting things to be true at the same time.
So how does the pluralist make all of this work for them?
For example, there is no mechanism in the Christian worldview where the Buddhist’s sin problem is resolved outside of faith in Christ. Nor is there is no mechanism in the Buddhist tradition whereby the Christian becomes enlightened.
So the pluralist must create their own system whereby the two are compatible and neither can hold the other as incorrect.
This involves either treating all religious exclusive claims as either being non-literal (mythical) or having limited importance.
This would include any claims to miracle which would seem to add credence to one faith over another. What really matters to the pluralist is harmony, love, justice and unity.
In other words, how you live your faith (orthopraxy) is more important than what how your faith says you should live (orthodoxy).
The Pluralist’s Sleight of Hand
But did you see what just happened there? The pluralist in attempting to negate all the exclusive claims of different religions created an exclusive claim of their own.
The pluralist denies the Muslim a chance to define his or her own religion with exclusive claims but is completely free to do so themselves.
Pluralism fails pluralistically. Which brings us back to the elephant.
A pluralist takes each person describing their religious truth and enlightenment and says “Yes but what you don’t know is that you are blind and only see in part.”
That’s perfectly laughable because the implication is that the pluralist can see just fine and in whole–and you can’t.
In the end, he’s more than happy to make a claim to exceptional knowledge that he won’t let any single faith make own their own.
The Pluralist Is Just as Blind
As you can see, pluralism isn’t an overarching view that combines all faiths in one big bubble bath of goodness. It’s just one more view claiming special enlightenment and truth–which isn’t very pluralistic, don’t you think?
So when someone says “What matters is that it makes sense to me and enables me to grow spiritually,” it’s easy to see the benefit to this claim even taken at face value and not applying it to itself.
It allows everyone to do what they want how they want to do it.
But if there is no objective truth to be found outside of one’s belief then you can never be wrong in what you believe.
In essence you’ve created a Stepford God that is made in your own image–he’s a robotic butler who will never contradict you but always please you.
Unfortunately this approach destroys the distinction between the terms “truth” and “belief” and implies that something is true because “I believe it.”
Where Pluralism Threatens the Christian Church
So where does pluralism affect the Christ follower and it’s church. Here’s a quote from JP Moreland’s book Love Your God with All Your Mind that I think says it well.
[Such] a church . . . will become . . . impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to bury Christian ideas under a veneer of soulless pluralism and misguided scientism. In such a context, the church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers—numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, . . . the church will become her own grave digger; her means of short-term “success” will turn out to be the very thing that marginalizes her in the long run.
The call is clear to preach the obnoxious and offensive gospel to a world and church that most of the time doesn’t want to hear it.
Absolutism [What You Need to Know--and Why]
**Guest post by Rob Powell. Part of a series on truth.**
True or False: Sean Connery was the best James Bond ever?
Of course the answer is true…
And as long as I keep this statement limited to my experience and preference it remains valid.
But, as soon as I try to put my preferences into a broader context and say “Sean Connery was THE best James Bond ever” I’m no longer stating my subjective preferences but claiming an objective truth and people will disagree with me (even though the rest of them couldn’t tote Connery’s martini glass).
Absolutism’s Enemy
It would be foolish of me to say that my personal tastes and preferences are true for everyone but somehow this idea has morphed into the consensus that everything is relative and we can’t really know anything as objectively true.
Blame it on the Enlightenment and modernism, political correctness, or El Nino but in some circles if you try to say that something is objectively or absolutely true you will hear “Well that may be true for you but it’s certainly not true for me,” regardless of the subject.
Does that mean that all knowledge is slave to personal bias and our own cultural baggage?
Is anything objectively true regardless of whether someone observes it and interprets it or not?
Relativism would have us think that the answer is an emphatic “no.”
Where Relativism Doesn’t Work
But do any of us actually live like that? Do people drive in a way that suits their biases and cultural milieu…or do they follow the rules of the road?
When figuring out how much Tylenol your toddler needs for a fever are you going to follow the dogmatic and restrictive instructions put on the bottle by “The Man” or will you play it like Ol’ Blue Eyes and say you did it your way?
What if engineers put structural supports where they “feel good” instead of where they will support the weight of the building?
Bottom line: Relativism really hasn’t made headway into areas where wrong beliefs have immediate consequences.
So where do we see it most prevalently? We see it in areas where there is a layer of ambiguity between the belief and its out-workings.
Absolutism Versus Relativism
Couple that with not wanting to offend other people [or have other people telling us what to do] and we get an “I’m okay, you’re okay” sentimental load of horse puckey.
But relativism doesn’t stop there. If you make a claim to objective truth today you can be labeled a bigot, close minded or intolerant.
Absolutism has come to be seen as close minded fundamentalism.
But in reality Absolutism is merely having a belief. It’s picking a team instead of rooting for the referees so you’re not disappointed when your team loses.
In the strictest sense absolutism isn’t that any one particular viewpoint is correct. Absolutism just says that there is an objective truth that matches what really is.
But if there is absolute truth why is it okay for my wife to say the car is too cold while I’m cracking the window because I think it’s too hot?
Because subjectively we are interpreting the temperature as hot or cold.
Objectively the car is 71 F . It would be incorrect for one of us to say it’s 71 F and the other say it’s 95 F.
Both of us can’t be right.
How Absolutism Defeats Relativism
Believe it or not, but within absolutism you can be tolerant of other beliefs. Yet tolerance used to mean we could agree to disagree–not that every idea was legitimately true.
The easy defeater to Relativism’s claim that all truth is culturally biased and only true for the believer is to simply say this:
“Then your belief that truth is culturally biased and only true for the believer is also culturally biased and only true for you?”
Relativism has no ground to stand on to say how truth is to be handled and interpreted on a scale grander than n=1.
I guess I can see the appeal of relativism. It takes the onus off the believer of having to provide evidence for their beliefs. It just has to feel right or pass whatever smell test they want to put on it. Or not.
You know, whatever.
We’ll get to how this plays itself out in greater detail with regards to the pluralist and the atheist another day but what does believing in an absolute truth mean when it comes to the professing Christian?
It means that Jesus’ exclusionary claims as the Messiah are not bigoted and intolerant. They are either true or they are not.
It means Jesus was either the Son of God or He wasn’t–but He can’t be both at the same time.
Once we know there is truth to be found we can study the evidence and come to a conclusion one way or another. It is a call to be like the Bereans in Acts who though open minded still studied the Scriptures to make sure Paul and Silas were speaking the truth.
So the next time you hear a relativist say “There’s no such thing as absolute truth”, ask them if they’re absolutely sure about that.
Now, discuss…
What Suffering Can Teach Us about God–and Ourselves
Of the enduring success of his book Catcher in the Rye the late J. D. Salinger said it was a living nightmare.
That sounds strange to me, a man who doesn’t have the success of a Salinger–and wouldn’t mind it.
But I think it would sound equally strange to a Haitian father who lost five children to a deadly earthquake.
Suffering Is Personal
I’ve never know devastation on the level of the Haiti earthquake.
I only know what it means to watch your father deteriorate rapidly from malignant, rapidly metastasizing lung cancer.
I only know what it means to watch a man fall 200 feet to his death in a climbing accident. [That man was my step father.]
My parents divorced when I was twelve. I’ve had my heart broken dozens of times before I married one of the most gracious person’s alive.
But I’ve never experienced devastation on the level of Haiti. And neither did Salinger.
But we can’t dismiss or minimize his pain. Or my pain. Or your pain–no matter what you’ve been through.
But neither does it really qualify us to answer the question of theodicy for other people–especially for those in Haiti.
The Worst Response to Suffering in the World
A recent BBC article asked, “Why Does God allow Natural Disasters to Occur?” Great question. Maybe.
The writer–a philosophy lecturer at the University of Glasgow–does an elegant job of covering the historical and modern arguments [and counter-arguments] for the problem of evil, but without landing on any one conviction.
Instead, he leaves you with the nagging impression that God is on trial–and things aren’t looking good for him.
Here are the facts: The universe doesn’t care about you or me. In fact, it doesn’t care about humans at all.
The universe and the earth that floats in it are nothing more than machines grinding away by impersonal forces. Sometimes those forces involve the destruction of humans.
Forces, mind you, set forth at some time by God. So we ask the question: If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why does he allow this to happen?
Why does he allow the mechanical operations of the world to destroy us? Naturally, when that question arises, it’s not God who is own trial–it’s us.
Now, I’m not big on defending more territory than I can manage, so in the long run I don’t feel obligated to answer this question.
Neither do I feel qualified.
Here’s why: outside of the aid my family has given to the survivors of the Haitian earthquake, in no way have I been involved in this tragedy.
I don’t know anyone in that country. I don’t have friends who know anyone in that country.
It’s peripheral to my existence, if you know what I mean.
In my mind, the best people to answer these questions are in Haiti. The worst, politicos and academics in America–like Lisa Miller or Pat Robertson or even me.
What We Do with Suffering
This has always intrigued me about the human race: When we see a tragedy like Haiti, we seem to absorb it all in and think this is the worst devastation WE’VE ever known.
It personally rocks our world. Is that the least bit fair–or even logical?
Sylvia Plath–a suburban mother and poet–equated her inner torment to that of the suffering of an Auschwitz Jew and thus buried her head in an oven.
She’s been criticized for co-opting Holocaust Jews’ trauma for her own.
And I think we are in danger of doing the same thing when we meditate on the meaning of a tragedy that doesn’t impact us personally–and then try to answer the so-called dilemma.
The real question is: What are people in Haiti saying? [Nod to Terry Mattingly for drawing my attention to this question.]
Haitians’ Religious Responses to the Earthquake
Emotions in Haiti range from steady faith to outright despair. One Haitian seminarian said, “You have to question your faith, but hopefully not lose it.”
Another woman cried: “This is what God did! See what God can do!”
Dudu Orelian, a Haitian man who lost a brother and nephew in the earthquake, stood outside the stone and metal rod wreckage that was once Notre Dame Cathedral of Port-au-Prince and said, ”God is angry at the world.”
Most Haitians are Christian–largely Catholic with a small but growing number of Protestants. But most also practice Voodoo–the official state religion [like Catholicism].
Regardless of their religious focus, though, they seem to say the same thing: in some measure the earthquake is the hand of God.
Rev. Eric Toussaint said, “We must recognize his power.”
Haitian-American musician Richard Morse–whose mother is a singer and Voodoo priestess–said, “If all of a sudden, in 15 seconds, 20 seconds, all the physical representations of corruption are destroyed, it gives you pause for thought.”
Indeed.
But what happens when you lose five children in the rubble? One man said, “How could He do this to us? There is no God.”
Another woman was seen tossing her Bible into a fire.
Each of these examples represents a personal response to the problem of suffering. Which brings me to my next point.
What We Can Know about God in Suffering
Pain is personal. Subjective. Non-quantifiable. Thus, immeasurable.
Does a person who lost five children in a school shooting experience any more emotional pain than a man who lost an adult son to cancer?
What about a writer tormented by the popularity his book brought him: Is that any less than a man who’s brother and nephew were killed?
No. It’s not fair to suggest that.
Neither do I think it’s entirely fair to adopt a stranger’s real tragedy to defend or object to some abstract argument.
Here’s what it all boils down to: God created man to relate to other men. To comfort them in desperate times. And in that relation, God is glorified.
That’s the pressing mandate in the wake of this horrific natural disaster.
And in the end, we know that God is neither indifferent nor ignorant of human suffering.
He put his son, Christ, on the cross to absorb the wrath of God we deserve and on the third day rose from the dead in a glorified body to announce that, indeed, it is okay to trust him and that death–the ultimate suffering–has been defeated…
And no matter the amount of pain we’ve personally experienced or torment we’ve endured, all that will one day be wiped away when we enter God’s everlasting presence.
That, ironically, is the ultimate answer to the problem of pain. And remember, I’m the worst person–the least qualified–in this case, to answer the question.
But it’s being asked. And I’m offering what little I have. Let me know what you think.
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