Truth

Note: the tone of this discussion no longer reflects my views. See my later post, "The Question at the Core of Existence."

Recommended Pre-Reading:
Representational Realism
The Limit of Philosophy
Skepticism

The Sheikah symbol from the Legend of Zelda. It represents, among other things, truth forgotten by history.

At my undergraduate college, I took a course titled “What is Truth?” The class compared the methods of science, social science, and the humanities for obtaining knowledge. As you can probably guess, I liked the class a lot. However, as the weeks went on, the discourse seemed to be steering toward a conclusion so absurd I could hardly believe it was happening: Truth does not exist. As soon as I recognized this, I struck to the heart of the matter. “The statement, ‘there is no Truth,’” I said, “cannot be true. Therefore Truth must exist.” A few of my classmates accused me of cheating, and we spent the rest of the period arguing.

On one level, the argument against Truth is not entirely without justification. People have been peddling ideas that are unjustified or proven false, as truth for as long as the concept has been around. When people are shown the cracks in the ideas they once believed, the natural reaction is to question the rest of their beliefs, and wonder if their reasons for believing them true are actually valid. Their questioning takes them to the fact that logic cannot prove itself, and they throw up their hands in defeat and say that Truth simply does not exist.

But this line of reasoning fails to see the difference between Truth and knowledge. Truth, as they search for it, is something foundational, beyond question, and from which absolutely certain knowledge can be built. But they are mistaken. To demonstrate, I propose a revolutionary concept: Truth-in-itself, the grand essence of reality, which is what it is, and exists independently of knowledge or perception. Truth-in-itself is unconditional. It depends on nothing. it simply is. Whenever I speak of Truth with a capital T, this is what I mean. Small-t truth I use whenever I speak of things I am certain of beyond reasonable doubt, or in the logical-mathematical sense of the word.

If Truth exists, then, what is it? Well I’m sorry, but I cannot tell you. To explain why, I will use an analogy. In the Bible, the second Commandment that God gave Moses was “Thou shalt not make for thyself an idol.” One of the popular interpretations of this is that if the Israelites made a symbol to represent God, they would end up worshipping the symbol, forgetting the God it was supposed to represent. Religious doctrines, ideologies, scientific paradigms, beliefs about the world and human nature—these are all Truth idols. When we worship our beliefs, taking their truth for granted, we forget that real Truth transcends all knowledge.

So are we then cursed to wander the Earth in search of something that cannot be found, never being any wiser or more knowledgeable than a newborn baby? Well it is not so simplistic. Though we may never come to know the whole Truth with absolute certainty, we can be confident that on average, the search in itself brings us ever closer. Yes, we sometimes take wrong turns, but if we are always examining what we think we know, we will find ourselves on the right track again before long.

Before I finish this topic, I’d like to bring up a problem I have seen people fall into. I call it the trap of second belief. Most of us live the beginning section of our lives believing what we do without reason, simply because we always have. When we examine our natural beliefs, we are struck by the holes and blinds spots in it. Stunned by learning that we have been ignorant our whole lives, we turn to what we have always seen as its opposite. We feel a great weight lift off our shoulders, and say, “I once was blind but now I see.” The reality is, though we may in fact see a little better, we are still mostly blind. This new belief, though we came to it with a measure of critical thinking instead of mere instinct and habit, is nonetheless still an idol. If we are wise we will see that throwing off our old, blind belief was not the end of our Truth-seeking journey, but the beginning.

The Truth is out there. We may never find it, and if we do we can never be justifiably certain, but it is there. Anyone who takes a belief as true and closes their mind to other possibilities, even if they arrived at their conclusion by rejecting a false belief, has substituted Truth for an idol. Anyone who gives up and says Truth does not exist is lost. To really serve Truth, we must always admit to the possibility that we are wrong and leave the door open to be persuaded by a good argument. The search for Truth is never-ending, but it is ever-satisfying.