Introduction

To continue this discussion honestly, I must address the topic of “subjective truth” head on. You can call it a housekeeping item. If you are someone whose religious or philosophical orientation depends on subjective truth for validation, then we have to cross this bridge or the rest of this dialog will not be relevant. However, if you are someone who values logic, and evidence-based truth, then feel free to skip this part.

To be clear, I am not writing this article to persuade people to think like me or to belittle their own perspectives. I write this for those within Christianity who, like me, have questioned faith without evidence. We are people for which there is no longer space for us within most churches. Many people like us, I’m afraid, are now part of the grand exodus out of the faith.

I also write for those honest thinkers, rationalists, for whom Christianity is no longer available because, unfortunately, many forms of the faith now require a dismissal of rationality in order to be a follower.

First, I must juxtaposed objective truth to subjective truth, an exercise in epistemology.

Objective Truth

“Truth,” which I have defined in this blog many times, is simply that which is consistent with reality. Thomas Aquinas, wrote in his Summa Theologica, veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, which translates, “truth is the conformity of intellect and thing,” or basically the same thing I said, but in thirteenth century Latin slangism.

Aquinas and I both believe in the existence of absolute truths and that there is no division between “religious truth” and “scientific truth.” It is also said of Thomas, “Aquinas believed that truth unites faith and science, and that both believers and scientists are united by a passion for truth and a disdain for relativism.”¹ This would certainly put Aquinas, as it does me, at odds with the postmodern or “new age” Christianity, which denies truth except for relative or “personal truth.”

Side Bar: Postmodernists and Doubt

I must mention to the thinking-doubting Christian that I believe the postmodern’s approach to doubt will in the end will be a disaster. Such author/speakers as the new Rob Bell, Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, if you listen carefully, deal with doubt, not by addressing the objective truths that I and Thomas Aquinas believe are vital to a good faith, but by removing truth altogether. You can’t have doubt if there is no truth to doubt can you? Instead, they subsitute sweet words of subjective truth, irrationality, experiences etc. as surrogates for objective truth. While they may have a noble cause, McLaren calls it “harmony and love,” in the end that will fail. Harmony and love cannot stand without a foundation of objective truth. For example, why does harmony and love matter? If there is no truth, then war and hate are just as moral and of the same noble aspiration.

For me personally, after I had left Christianity in 1990 and returned to agnosticism, it was through the theologian/philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who believes strongly in absolute, discoverable, objective truths, that I was able to find my way back to the objective, historical Jesus. The motto of Schaeffer’s fellowship (L’Abri) was “honest answers for honest questions.” In contrast, I’ve heard Rohr say, “Questions are okay, but there are no answers.” If I had met Rohr in the early 1990s rather than Schaeffer, certainty I would be an atheist today. I heard a Christian speaker (and I can’t remember his name) say, “Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren are the Christians’ gateway drug to atheism, the doorway out of the church.” I had to think about that for a while, but now I agree. Back to what I was saying:

Objective truth is discoverable via our senses, collecting data from our environment by, seeing (including observing and reading), hearing (including listening), tasting, smelling, and feeling (meaning touch, not emotions). We call that data “evidence” and process it logically, via deductive or inductive reason. If that data strongly suggests a particular conclusion, we call that conclusion,”objective truth.” Because our brains are not perfect, we can never have absolute certainty about a truth, but we can have a high enough probably in a conclusion, to consider it “truth.”

I am not a political person, but this following example is so blatant, I must use it. Over 60 courts looked into fraud in the American 2020 election (many of them headed by Trump-appointed judges) and the conclusions were unanimous, looking at the evidence, no significant fraud took place. Considering too that Donald Trump has an enduring reputation for lying, therefore, with such overwhelming evidence we can conclude with great confidence that the 2020 election was fair and claims that it wasn’t, a lie.²

Using objective truth is how we live every minute of our ordinary lives. If you reverse engineer our brains, this is how they work. A theist would say that this was God’s intention (by direct creation or using evolutionary processes), while an atheist would say this is how our brains evolved, via natural selection, making us more successful than our competitors. It is only in the areas of religion or superstition that subjective truth is relied upon to answer the big questions of life such as meaning and morals.

The idea of finding truth subjectively, meaning that the idea came directly from God into our brains without any evidence, except a feeling (emotions), then it is easily studied to find if it is true. Real truth is always predictive. If the truth, based on evidence, is that loggerhead sea turtles lay eggs on Florida beaches only after the water reaches 70 degrees, then you can predict that they will show up this coming April through September.

For those who claim that they have knowledge directly from God, their truth should be superior to those who don’t recognize such subjective truth. This would be demonstrated by very practical means. But it simply isn’t true. Christians make as many—maybe more—poor choices than those who do not claim to have special knowledge directly from God. It is therefore not surprising that the white Evangelical is the group in America that is most likely to believe in baseless (without evidence) conspiracy theories.³

Disagreements with Aquinas

In this series of articles, I am relying heavily upon Thomas Aquinas because I happen to be currently studying him. However, there are areas where I disagree with him. I greatly respect Aquinas, but I do not have blind allegiance and we know much more today about human behavior and the cosmos than we did in the thirteenth century. This area of divine revelation (a kind of truth without objective evidence) is one of those areas in which I disagree with Aquinas . . . and probably much of modern Christianity.

Thomas seems to say many things (his Summa Theologica alone is over 6500 pages) that support the need for divine revelation and some that don’t. I will say that I am highly skeptical of divine revelation, not reflecting on God’s limitation, but on the limitations of the human mind and our mercurial emotions. To say, “I know God revealed himself to me, and I know that with certainty,” requires a great deal of intellectual arrogance and magical thinking in my opinion.

Side Bar: The Bible as a Divine Reveation

I accept the Bible as divine revelation but even the Bible should be addressed with objectivity. When was it written, by whom, for what purpose? You look at who was writing scripture, what context they were writing, and what were they trying to tell us. You also have to treat it as other ancient manuscripts, critically evaluating translations and to see if what we have today is faithful to the original. As an evangelical, we treated the Bible as a book of magic, pure subjective revelation. What Paul, for example, meant to write was irrelevant to the meaning I felt on a particular morning while reading a passage he had written. Now back.

We have a powerful resource wired deeply into our brains, which we call our emotions. The word, is from the Latin, emovere, which means “to move through.” So, our emotions function (and was intended by God, in my view), to act upon the truth our reason has discovered, but not to discover truth even if it relabeled it as “spiritual.” It is highly unreliable for finding truth. Yet, our emotions are wonderful and should be part of any relationship, including a relationship with God.

My undergraduate degree was in psychology. That gives me no authority on the subject, however part of my training was spending time in a mental hospital, Green Valley. In almost every case—often due to no fault of their own—the patients were there because of “emotional-reasoning.” Their emotions were telling them, on the extreme end of psychosis, that they were Jesus, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, the devil, the president, or a cucumber. They knew that with absolute certainty. But even on the less severe end of the spectrum, patients with serious anxiety and depression, their emotions were being substituted for reason, making conclusions that they were worthless or in great danger from even leaving their houses.

There was a time in my own life that I became 100% convinced that not only my wife didn’t love me but had never loved me. It took a long time to get out of the convincing emotional reasoning and objective evidence was the breadcrumbs that lead me back to reality. Having cancer has convinced me, at times, that I am totally worthless, a complete failure, and fighting that emotional reasoning is a daily battle. Emotional reason feels so real . . . but it’s not. As the Bible says in Jeremiah, the emotions are totally untrustworthy.

I do acknowledge a form of intuition, which some interpret as supernatural or irrational, but I see as subliminal reasoning. “I had a feeling that this trip with Hank wasn’t going to go well” that feeling was based on previous trips with Hank, or something about Hank’s personality that would predict a bad trip with a rational prediction based on evidence. Truth always predicts with accuracy.

Thomas Aquinas and I appear to agree on this when he writes, The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

However, Aquinas, and most of Christianity, and other religions, accept a divine, subjective truth via God’s direct revelation. The only evidence comes from their emotional certainty.

I admit that the Bible strongy suggest a direct revelation in places (see Aquinas defense below), but if that is true, it must match reality. If we base all of our convictions about Christianity being true upon a mystical revelation, then we can never have intellectual confidence that it is true beyound pretence and we will deny access to Christianity to rational people. Some of us need an honest approach without magical thinking filling the gaps, or otherwise our faith will always be lacking. Here is how Thomas defends his position:

It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason. Firstly, indeed, because man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason: “The eye hath not seen, O God, besides Thee, what things Thou hast prepared for them that wait for Thee” (Is. 66:4) . . . Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation. Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors. Whereas man’s whole salvation, which is in God, depends upon the knowledge of this truth. Therefore, in order that the salvation of men might be brought about more fitly and more surely, it was necessary that they should be taught divine truths by divine revelation. It was therefore necessary that besides philosophical science built up by reason, there should be a sacred science learned through revelation. (Summa Theologica)

To further explain Thomas’s complex position, he also writes in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason. Such is the truth that God is triune. But there are some truths which the natural reason also can reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like. In fact, such truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of the natural reason.

Aquinas, along with Augustine, were the chief architects of Christian orthodoxy. While I’m not a fan of the dark ages, we rationalists, unlike in the twenty-first century, would have felt welcomed in Aquinas’ church. However, in our present churches, we who use reason as God has designed it to be used, are seen as oddbals, spiritually inferior, or even evil. It is for our tribe I write . . . and breathe.

Additionally, in several places in his writings, Aquinas says that God has spoken in two volumes, Scripture and Nature. The two should never contradict each other. It otherwords, if science and the Bible disagree, at least one of them is being misinterpreted. Having studied the Bible extensivey for decades, I, therefore, now want to read the pages of his nature aka reality, to see if they can give a sufficient answer for the grand enigma. That is why I have a passion for science and shed tears when I look at images from the James Webb Telescope, feeling only a touch of God’s grandeur.

Epilogue

If these articles are helpful to you, just give me a thumbs up or something in the comments. My data specs tell me that sometimes hundreds have read them from around the world but I’m not sure if I am making sense as I have little feedback. When I’ve been personally attacked, which happens far too often, they always are attacking a strawman verson of myself, assuming that I am saying the most absurd things, leaving me wondering if I’m writing with clarity.

I’ve been writing about doubt and against the loss of factual truth for 30 years and sometimes I feel I’m just peeing into the wind, being unable to compete with the attractiveness of postmodernism and today’s irrational “spirituality.” The postmodernist winks and says, “Sacrifice your aspiration for truth for the sake of harmony and love.” But I say, harmony and love will eventually fail when there is no truth underpinning it. Some days I feel that I am completely alone in this journey, the rest of humanity is going the opposite way. It is okay if I am.

I will end with one more quote from Aquinas:

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

With Respect,

Mike

1. https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/st-thomas-aquinas-and-our-dialogue-with-modern-science/ ↩︎
2. https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-elections ↩︎
3. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/rise-of-conspiracies-reveal-an-evangelical-divide-in-the-gop/ ↩︎