The Problem Of Truth And Why It Requires Courage

Martin Gurri, in his “Truth and Its Consequences”1, argues that, “Truth, for the human animal, is always partial, temporary, and local.” While he recognizes our general belief that “Truth – complete accordance with reality – must be one and eternal,” he concludes that, for us, it is not.

Citing Plato’s Ideals, Popper and Kuhn and their thoughts on scientific theories, Gurri concludes that truth, for us, is partial, temporary, and local. But one confusion Gurri seems to fall into is the distinction between truth, and the knowledge of that truth.

The Problem of Knowledge – that we have a sense that we can know but cannot explain or even justify completely how we know – perplexes and frustrates us. We innately long for certainty, absolute knowledge, and find it an elusive chimera.

A Finite Problem:

We are finite beings, limited in ability and capacity. We may labor to master a subject, study all we can find of other’s research and thoughts on it, focus our energies on learning everything we can about it only to find there is more to learn, and even more we are not able to learn about that subject. Then we look up to realize that there are more subjects, requiring more effort, effort we do not have the capacity to make.

That is, we find we are finite people confronted with, as far as we can determine, an infinite universe of infinite complexity. We discover that the sum of a finite number of finite beings pooling their finite understanding is, itself, a finite thing.

Uncertainty in Knowledge:

Then when we examine what understanding we believe we have, we find it is founded on guesswork. Knowing our senses can be deceived, we nonetheless are forced to act as if they are reliable. The alternative is madness and despair. We are compelled to behave as if the future will resemble the past, as if our senses are most frequently reliable, as if our assumptions are valid.

That is, we have to rely on premises, postulates, hypotheses, and assumptions.

We find ourselves required to act on faith, or more precisely, to have faith in things we cannot prove – that are unprovable. We encounter the inescapable necessity of a theoretical framework, a world view whereby we strive to make sense of life, of our experiences, and to guide our decisions.

Tools Toward Understanding:

One of the tools employed in trying to further our understanding is that of scientific endeavor. As Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim wrote in Studies in the Logic of Explanation:2

“To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question ‘Why?’ rather than only the question ‘What?’, is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates.”

However, the “Why?” questions for which science can provide answers are not all the “Why?” questions we have. Science may be able to provide an answer detailing the causes and effects of the situation where a loved one has cancer – but there is an unanswered question in “Why does he have cancer?”, one which science provides no answer at all, a question of Purpose or Meaning that transcends mere descriptive cause-and-effect answers.

A Searching Dilemma:

We are then driven to conclude that either there is no answer to the question of Purpose and Meaning, or the answer is not found in science.

There are those who have embraced the idea that there is no answer, that is that there is no meaning or sense to our suffering or our lives. But there is no solid justification for that conclusion, any more than there is solid justification for believing our senses give us generally reliable information about the world we believe is around us. To adopt that answer is just as irrational as rejecting it.

Nonetheless we find within ourselves an innate longing for meaning and purpose – a longing which all mankind shares. It is, as C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity: “…Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it…”

Lewis is speaking of a sense of Right and Wrong, a moral sense, and yet his observation applies as well to a sense of Purpose and Meaning, a sense of something that provides a value to life.

We usually turn, then, to an explanation or a world-view that provides us with an answer to these other “Why?” questions, questions of meaning and purpose beyond physical cause-and-effect.

We seem driven to adopt some framework of belief, some world-view, that allows us to reason about the world we find ourselves in, some way of understanding Truth, the Reality which impinges itself on our consciousnesses.

We find in this explanatory category that either we are confined to the combined ideas of finite beings with their finite experiences trying to explain an infinite universe, or we evaluate the possibility that there is an infinite being which has real knowledge, preferably complete real knowledge, of truth and of the meaning and purpose of our finite lives, and which communicates that knowledge to us.

It may seem, as Gurri says, “that the master narratives of religion and community are in the midst of an extinction event.” If one looks at only the last 200 years of Western Civilization that may be the impression one gets.

To the Jews suffering under Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 B.C., or under Titus son of Vespasian in 70 A.D., or the Christians under Nero in 64 A.D., or in the other similar events throughout history it may certainly have seemed that they were in “an extinction event” – but it only seemed such at the time.

Perhaps the enduring power of the religious worldview, most particularly of the Judeo-Christian world-view, lies in its track record of providing explanatory, prescriptive, and predictive solutions and answers that have been found to work by millions of rational people who have adopted that world- view.

The Once and Future Contender:

The explanatory power of the Judeo-Christian world-view continues despite the apparent extinction events of history. Arguably, it has provided a framework wherein science as we know it could grow and flourish, for it provides the scientist with the assurance that if there is a Creator Who created this cosmos intentionally and with a plan, then there is a structure to it that can be discovered.

The Judeo-Christian world-view, furthermore, provides foundations for answering the Purpose and Meaning questions we have. It precludes any arbitrary abuse of other human beings because, it claims, that every human being has value, purpose, and meaning inherent in their nature and being, because of how they are created.

It provides an explanation of the pain and trouble we find ourselves experiencing, and a guide for minimizing that pain, even offering predictively that pain need not last forever. In examining the Truth, it provides us a framework wherein we may come to an understanding of Truth which is often found more satisfactory than the understandings given by philosophers in their finite reasonings.

Testing for Truth:

It is foundational to the Judeo-Christian world-view that its claims are both true and reasonable. It boldly asserts that rather than irrational claims that must be accepted without evidence, it provides a set of statements which can be tested by rational inquiry, that provide satisfying answers to the “Why?” questions science cannot answer as well as provide assurance that science can truly provide answers to the physical “Why?” questions with results that can be predicted and tested.

If the Judeo-Christian world-view is true, then it makes demands on us as moral beings. Demands that are uncomfortable, absolute, and unavoidable. It tosses down the gauntlet: “Do you really want to know Truth? Then you must be willing to accept the consequences and change to live by what you learn of Truth.”

The Judeo-Christian world-view brazenly opens itself up to honest reasoned inquiry. But it gives a terrible challenge to us as well. Once we realize what Truth is, we must embrace it in its entirety. The alternative is to live in denial of Truth – which is in and of itself willful insanity.

The Demands of Truth:

Truth, however we come to grips with it, will make demands of us. It may demand we acknowledge our status as finite and imperfect beings – physically and morally. It may demand changes to our behaviors, our actions relative to the world in which we find ourselves, and the other occupants of that world. It may demand a change of perspective, a re-evaluation of what we have done and are doing, and of what we plan to do.

The temptation is, therefore, for us to rationalize what we are doing, to justify our behavior and attitudes contrary to the Truth, and to avoid the uncomfortable need to change ourselves or be changed by some means out of our control.

That is, we sometimes may pick our world-view with an eye toward minimizing the changes we need to make in ourselves and without regard of the explanatory power of that world-view. Facing a world-view that may be better at providing the answers to the “Why?” questions but demands deep changes in our perspective of ourselves, we may flee to the comfortable refuge of the familiar false.

It requires courage to face Truth.

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally written by the author in response to an article in Discourse Magazine. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

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1https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2022/09/20/truth-and-its-consequences/

2(reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Science Baruch Brody, ed.)