A friend of mine, Annie, posed a seemingly random question on Twitter tonight:
How does one find truth? What is truth? How can you define truth? What makes it “truth”? Thoughts…
Before we get to that, answer for yourself this question and remember it for the end: Is rape wrong? If you think it is, why?
So, she asked the tweeted question after a difficult conversation with a friend of hers. This fella has been asking God for 15 years to show him He’s real. Twitter is a horrible medium for the kind of conversation that must follow a question like this, though another friend and I quickly engaged her with as much pith as we could squeeze into 140 characters. Conversation advanced a bit as I referred to God as the anchor point of truth, a sentiment echoed by our mutual friend John.
If we mean that truth is something objective, then it must come from an objective source. Only God can be that.
Trying to put herself in the shoes of her own friend on whose behalf she’d posed the original question, Annie asked:
But can’t matter be objective, also? Isn’t the universe objective? Why does it have to point to God?
So yes, this conversation needs to be had, but Twitter will not do.
It’s a fair question, the original one about truth. But once asked, I think it must be honestly pursued. To ask such a bold metaphysical question, one must be willing to follow it wholeheartedly to its end. Our culture has a bad habit—with my peer group exhibiting the worst of it—of asking bold, deep philosophical questions and either accepting self-pleasing, shallow answers or feeling that it’s an academically praiseworthy thing to be always asking but never finding an answer. To address the latter of the proclivities, it’s simply worthless to pursue the truth of a matter if you’re unwilling to accept that truth when it presents itself… unless truth is an ever-changing, relative thing. And that brings us to the problem about which my friend is concerned.
For an extended dive into this answer, I can recommend nothing better than Francis Shaeffer’s He is There and He is Not Silent. Schaeffer comes at it as a former Atheist, and from a purely philosophical angle, he explains why God must exist and why He must be a multi-personal God. It’s the knowledge of a personal, triune God that caused everything to click for Schaeffer, and this book has been instrumental in pushing me to think about God with a philosophical perspective.
He begins with a profound statement by 20th century French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.” This gets at the thing we’re talking about here, and it’s something I poorly attempted to convey to Annie. Man is finite, so man is not, as Schaeffer puts it, “a sufficient integration point for himself.” What he means is that we must draw our meaningful existence from something more, something infinitely better. This is why, though it may not seem so on its face, Atheism or even merely a “all we are is just smart animals” way of thinking is so fatalistic. Honestly, if not for God, what’s the point? We would have no purpose, no meaning at all. (Of course, we would not even be here if not for God; I’m just making a point.)
Sartre, an Atheist through and through, is not alone in recognizing that finite points by themselves are not enough. Plato also understood, as related by Schaeffer, “that you have to have absolutes, or nothing has meaning.” So in response to Annie’s question about whether that objective thing has to be God… it only makes sense that there is one absolute, and He is God. Matter cannot be the reference point for truth because it is not objective; it is not independent. It is in the created order, and existential dependence is one of the grand conditions that delineates God from everything else. (I would also be interested in hearing more specifically what Annie, or perhaps the friend she was talking to, meant by, “Can’t matter be objective, also?” In terms of how truth is defined, what did she mean here?)
As an aside, I think a big reason we see so much concern over truth, creation, etc., is this: if we accept this personal, infinite God’s existence, we’ve gotta start playing by His rules and taking what he says for reality. But if we’re going to deny Him, then there are a lot of things in philosophy and science that have to shift to accommodate our denial as science itself contradicts those very notions. Take, for example, evolution free of an intelligent designer. It’s been argued hundreds of ways, but macro evolution without a designer simply violates the second law of thermodynamics. Thus the conflicts. Anyway…
To put another layer on the argument, we can look at truth specifically. The objective nature of truth is real, and it’s something we all sort of get. It’s the kind of thing common to all mankind. We’re born with it; nobody needs to explain it to us. Another famous former Atheist begins his own—and thankfully far more accessible—book on Christianity with a look at moral values and truth. C. S. Lewis opens Mere Christianity presenting us with something with which we’re all familiar: quarreling.
‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—’Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—’Why should you shove in first?’ … People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of a standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse.
If they didn’t have some kind of real standard to which they could appeal, Lewis concludes, they might indeed fight like animals. But humans don’t do that; instead, we quarrel.
Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.
Philosopher William Lane Craig calls this concept objective moral values, and argues that God exists because objective moral values exist, tying a direct link between God and the existence of objective moral values.
I really recommend watching the whole thing, as I can’t get across in a blog post (that you’ll read anyway) all the good stuff in that 4 minute video clip. Toward the end of the clip, raises the question about rape. Things like rape, cruelty, and child abuse are wrong, and we all know it. But why? If you appeal to Right and Wrong, what’s your standard? And if your standard is relative to something like social mores, is it really wrong or just taboo?
Now while C. S. Lewis is laying the foundation for his first chapter’s thesis by exposing how we nearly always appeal to a standard in our quarreling with each other, Craig is using our general agreement that truth is objective as the basis to prove God’s existence. As both men’s arguments continue, those arguments each would require the thinker to reject the objective nature of truth in order to reject the existence of God. I can’t honestly do that.
From Lewis, the ultimate appeal to real Right and Wrong:
[T]hey thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
[Edit: I've updated this post to provide some clarity. Where I had previously written "objective truth," I have replaced it with something akin to "the objective nature of truth."]