Defining Truth

I have done this many times on this blog; however, once again, I must define “Truth” because it is one of the most abused words. Many blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels use the word “truth” in their title, but with a different meaning. Religious sites use it to represent their dogmas. Political websites use it to represent their worldview. Even Donald Trump created his own social media network when his lies were called out on traditional social media sites. His “Truth Social” ironically is a haven for lies.

I use the word “Truth” to mean what aligns with reality. Thomas Aquinas defined Truth in the thirteenth century as “That which agrees with nature.” The truth I refer to stands alone. It would still have the same meaning without religion or politics. I differ from the atheist in that I believe that reason, truth, and the process of finding truth are each part of an intelligent design for how the cosmos works.

The Nature of Absolute Truth

At any moment, every particle in the cosmos is in an exact location and has one exact nature. A particle could simultaneously exist as a particle and wave but have a precise weight, color, energy, etc. If you add time, that particle will have an exact motion and role in a cause and effect.

When you scale that up from the miniscule to the human level, it is the same. All human activities are absolute in the present and history. Napoleon’s army had a decisive loss outside of Waterloo Belgium on June 18, 1815. The movement of his army and the armies of Wellington and Blücher were precise down below the millimeter level. A finite number of musket and cannon balls were fired with a precise trajectory, killing a precise number of men.

An oyster shell found with charcoal in Vanguard Cave at Gibraltar was opened on a particular day thirty-some thousand years ago by a single Neanderthal using a particular stone tool and cooking it over a fire, and the day was either cloudy, sunny or partly cloudy.

Even human motivations are precise and of a certain purity or variegated with a precise mixture of motives. Everything in nature is absolute. In a perfect world, all these characteristics could be directly observed and known with certainty. There is no relative or subjective truth in nature. The language of nature, and what I call the native language of God, is mathematics. Mathematics is always certain. It is upon the scaffolding of mathematics that reality rests. Two plus two never equals five. Truth cannot be manufactured by wishful thinking. Factual truth is absolute in every case.

The limitation for humans in finding the truth is that our senses, as good as they are, cannot observe all the factual data all the time. New tools, ever bigger telescopes, microscopes, electron tunneling microscopes, synchrotron light sources, and better tools for understanding human behavior, are enlarging the observable world, however, we will never view all the data we need to reach conclusions with certainty. Neither is our reason perfect. Some facts, while absolute, are unknowable.

Truth and Probabilities

To give a practical example of this abstract example of truth, a pro-Trump relative of mine said that she does not believe Trump ever committed adultery or rape, because she was not there under the bed when it happened. She is correct when you are talking about truth with near absolute certainty. But we don’t live our lives that way. We live on probabilities. The best humans can do is to examine the data, and use logic, to find the highest probability. The scientific method takes this to the extreme by making the best observations, taking away all personal biases, and reaching a conclusion with the highest possible statistical certainty, however, even then, there is no absolute certainty.

Because we cannot know everything with absolute certainty, does not mean that we throw up our hands, as postmodernism suggests. We must not end up with the notion that all truth is relative, all opinions of equal value. Some opinions are lies, and some have a high probability of being factual. Someone at my church recently expressed the intellectual mood at this moment in history when she said, “I don’t know who to believe anymore.”

The Greatest Inference of Finding Truth

The greatest obstacle for humans to finding truth with a high probability is not our limited ability to observe the data, or our limited reason to make sense of the data, but the inference of our emotions. Our emotions are profoundly good, otherwise, without them, we would be like a pure-bred Vulcan (in Star Trek). Spock was a hybrid Vulcan and human and while very logical had some human emotions.

Our emotions (aka feelings), are a glorious thing, given by God in my view, however, our feelings were never designed to find truth. Even the Bible says that our hearts (feelings) are the most deceitful thing in creation (Jeremiah 17:9). Having a degree in classical psychology and working for almost 40 years in neurology, I know how our emotions can derail our ability to find truth. We are all delusional at times. The tragedy when Kierkegaard called truth subjective, was empowering feelings as the final judge of what’s true and what’s not, even when labeled “spiritual.”

Religious Lying

Because the evangelicals are the ones who brought Trump to power and now sustain and promote his lies, I must comment on their view of lying.

Lying, unfortunately, is endemic to religion. In the case of Christianity, this is despite the Bible condemning lying and placing a high value on truth.

Thomas Aquinas said God has written two books, the Bible and Nature. If they ever disagree, then one or both are being misinterpreted. But now when Christian’s cultural beliefs differ from what is observed in nature, they manufacture a false reality to accommodate their beliefs and generate conspiracy theories to discredit the view that they disagree with. I will give just three examples out of dozens; 1) miracles are commonplace, 2) the earth is only six thousand years old, and 3) gay people choose that lifestyle because they are morally degenerate.

So, while the Christian church should be standing like a beacon for factual truth (and many Christians are) a large swath of the American Church has succumbed to lies. The conservative church has exchanged its aspiration for truth, for political power. The progressive church has exchanged its aspirations for truth for harmony. But factual truth is the basis for everything. Without truth, political power is worthless, and true harmony and justice are unattainable.

Today the church needs Bonhoeffer, Wilberforce, Spurgeon, Grimké, Tubman, and the Wesleys as champions for truth against a world of lies.

Social Media

I will give one last piece to this puzzle. That is social media. While it is true that postmodernism has paved the way for a pathological liar to take power of this country, social media has been the fuel to make this happen so fast. Twenty years ago, only legacy information distributors (network news) informed the public. They had a professional standard of telling the truth. If they broadcast false news, they would apologize, and someone would lose their job.

Now, with the web, everyone has a platform, even idiots like me. In that highly competitive market, to stand out, you must say shocking things, things that go against the establishment, which means lying. There is a psychological advantage to having “gnosis” which is secret knowledge that only you have. The internet is full of people who are promoting health products (for money) with the premise that they have found a secret, natural cure that the medical establishment doesn’t want you to know about.

Below: Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, looking at social media, when critics go silent, people go stupid. The moderates go silent and the extremists go louder. Social media is good for tearing things down, not building them up. It is going to be worse now as people like Mark Zuckerberg, with a fear of retribution by the bully Donald Trump, are removing all fact-checking from FaceBook.

I could give you (literally) thirty thousand examples of how Donald Trump lies, but the one that is most graphic is the size of his crowd at his first inauguration. He claimed it was the largest one in history. It was not. Obama’s first was the largest. So, Trump had the official photo of his inauguration edited to look larger. Manufactured reality.

This is a silly example. When we live in a false reality, it will be catastrophic. The closer a society is to reality, the healthier it is. All great empires have fallen because of the lies they tell themselves.

The Consequences of Lying

I will end below with an excellent video about political lying. But before I leave, I must emphasize the damage lying does to a culture.

Jesus said about Satan, “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”  Lying is corrosive to a culture and left unchecked, will be the downfall of America.

Before Jesus’ words, the early Greek philosophers all warned that lies would destroy a society. The only exception was that Plato said there was a rare place for a lie when it benefits society.

The Parable of the River Village

I’m going to base this story, loosely, on the Jamestown Flood of 1889. Imagine a village sitting beside a lovely river in a canyon. A few miles above this village is a dam that creates a large lake. Some residents near the dam bring to the mayor’s attention that they have observed cracks in the dam. The mayor (Smith) hires a civil engineering firm to evaluate the dam. They indeed found many cracks and encouraged the mayor to lower the level of the lake or it could break. Smith followed their advice.

A wealthy family (Browns) lives on the lake and owns a boat dock, a very successful business, that is shut down from the lower lake levels. They become angry at Mayor Smith, so Brown runs for mayor. This Brown creates a false reality (lies) that Mayor Smith is corrupt and lying about the weakened dam because Smith has a cousin (false) who is a dam builder who wants the contract to build a new dam. Smith warns that this is a lie and is worried about the village’s safety.

Brown was more charismatic in messaging and the people voted for Brown over Smith. Brown raises the level of the lake, revitalizing their family business. The next year, the dam fails and the whole town drowns.

I will write more about what we can do in the next post. But using this parable as an example, when people said, “We don’t know who to believe,” here is the answer. Due diligence. The people had access to the civil engineer’s report. They can look up the firm. They could talk to the engineers. They could try to find this dam-building cousin. We must hold an aspiration for finding the truth, not trusting the spokesperson, or disaster will come. My greatest fear is that Trump will be very successful, which will set a new precedent that pathological lying is good. Second to that, I fear a catastrophic failure of his presidency, where another country like Iran, will take advantage of the chaos with an attack. Or, that there will be bloodshed among American people and we lose all hope of ever becoming anything but a failed state. My greatest hope is that some Republicans come to their senses or Trump himself repents and develops a moral compass for the first time.

Yuval Noah Harari the bestselling author of Sapiens and historian describes the unique challenges of artificial intelligence in finding truth in the future in his new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI,

“Why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years? Why is it that very sophisticated societies have been as susceptible as stone age tribes to mass delusion and the rise of destructive ideologies?” …

I will do one more article, looking at how we get out of this mess from my 30-thousand-foot view. I will be brief and practical. The videos I have shared provide various perspectives on how to address this situation, each offering valuable insights.

Respectively,

Mike, the greatest of liars.